Harrison Blaustein Neg
| Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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| Apple Valley | 3 | Iowa City West ST | Jason Meyer |
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| Apple Valley | 3 | Iowa City West ST | Jason Meyer |
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| Apple Valley | 2 | Lexington AT | Zach Thornhill |
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| Columbia | 9 | all | alll |
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| Columbia | 4 | Princeton AS | Ben Erdmann |
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| Columbia | Quarters | San Mateo YR | Andrea Reier, Kevin Wang, Forrest Weintraub |
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| Columbia | 1 | Nashua HS South EG | Eric He |
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| Grapevine | 1 | Westlake AK | Delon Fuller |
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| Grapevine | 3 | Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Micah Thode |
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| Grapevine | 3 | Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Micah Thode |
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| Grapevine | 5 | Strake Jesuit VC | Allison Aldridge |
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| Harvard | Triples | Dulles VN | Henry Eberhart Saianurag Karavadi, Ronak Ahuja |
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| Harvard | 6 | Woodlands PA | Ronak Ahuja |
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| Harvard | 6 | Woodlands PA | Ronak Ahuja |
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| Harvard | 1 | Providence AA | Tahj Johnson |
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| Harvard | 4 | Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Ausha Curry |
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| Harvard | Doubles | Cooper City NR | Henry Eberhart, Saianurag Karavadi, Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Princeton | 4 | Strath Haven AM | Kiarra Broadnax |
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| Princeton | Doubles | Scarsdale BS | Jayanne Forrest, Albert Kang, Claudia Ribera |
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| Princeton | 1 | Dwight-Englewood EK | Kevin Cheng |
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| UPenn | 6 | Ridge SN | Eric He |
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| Yale | Doubles | Stuyvesant MZ | Henry Eberhart, Amulya Natchukuri, Mark Kivimaki |
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| Yale | Finals | all | all |
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| Yale | 6 | Acton-Boxborough AK | lila avender |
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| Yale | 1 | American Heritage Broward EM | Nathan Frankel |
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| all | 1 | all | all |
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| all | 1 | all | all |
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| Tournament | Round | Report |
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| Apple Valley | 3 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Jason Meyer AC - Rawls |
| Apple Valley | 3 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Jason Meyer AC - Rawls |
| Apple Valley | 2 | Opponent: Lexington AT | Judge: Zach Thornhill AC - UK AC |
| Columbia | 4 | Opponent: Princeton AS | Judge: Ben Erdmann AC - Asteroid Mining |
| Columbia | Quarters | Opponent: San Mateo YR | Judge: Andrea Reier, Kevin Wang, Forrest Weintraub AC - Lunar Heritage |
| Columbia | 1 | Opponent: Nashua HS South EG | Judge: Eric He AC - Mining |
| Grapevine | 1 | Opponent: Westlake AK | Judge: Delon Fuller AC - aff |
| Grapevine | 3 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Judge: Micah Thode AC - AC |
| Grapevine | 3 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Judge: Micah Thode AC - AC |
| Grapevine | 5 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit VC | Judge: Allison Aldridge AC - Kant AC |
| Harvard | Triples | Opponent: Dulles VN | Judge: Henry Eberhart Saianurag Karavadi, Ronak Ahuja AC - Kant AC |
| Harvard | 6 | Opponent: Woodlands PA | Judge: Ronak Ahuja AC - Cap |
| Harvard | 6 | Opponent: Woodlands PA | Judge: Ronak Ahuja AC - Cap |
| Harvard | 1 | Opponent: Providence AA | Judge: Tahj Johnson AC - Lunar Heritage |
| Harvard | 4 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Judge: Ausha Curry AC - AC |
| Harvard | Doubles | Opponent: Cooper City NR | Judge: Henry Eberhart, Saianurag Karavadi, Kattichka Cazeau AC - Baudrillard |
| Princeton | 4 | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: Kiarra Broadnax AC - US |
| Princeton | Doubles | Opponent: Scarsdale BS | Judge: Jayanne Forrest, Albert Kang, Claudia Ribera AC - Existentialism |
| Princeton | 1 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Kevin Cheng AC - US Agricultural workers |
| UPenn | 6 | Opponent: Ridge SN | Judge: Eric He AC - Imaginary Ruins |
| Yale | Doubles | Opponent: Stuyvesant MZ | Judge: Henry Eberhart, Amulya Natchukuri, Mark Kivimaki AC - Pragmatism |
| Yale | 6 | Opponent: Acton-Boxborough AK | Judge: lila avender AC - AC |
| Yale | 1 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward EM | Judge: Nathan Frankel AC- AC |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
| Entry | Date |
|---|---|
0 - Contact InfoTournament: all | Round: 1 | Opponent: all | Judge: all I disclose and format my documents the way I learned on my team. If you need me to change my docs (i.e change the highlighting color, change the font for accessibility reasons) I am very happy to accommodate. If you want me to meet any interps before round, please let me know. | 9/8/21 |
1 - DisclosureTournament: Harvard | Round: 1 | Opponent: Providence AA | Judge: Tahj Johnson B. Evidence ethics Its advocacy skills – t Implication DROP THE DEBATER: No RVIs NO RVIs:
| 2/21/22 |
1 - May not bracketTournament: Yale | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Stuyvesant MZ | Judge: Henry Eberhart, Amulya Natchukuri, Mark Kivimaki Standards
Comp interps
| 9/19/21 |
1 - MisdisclosureTournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: Woodlands PA | Judge: Ronak Ahuja
Implication DROP THE DEBATER: No RVIs NO RVIs:
Competing Interps USE COMPETING INTERPS: | 2/21/22 |
1 - MisdisclosureTournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: Woodlands PA | Judge: Ronak Ahuja
Implication DROP THE DEBATER: No RVIs NO RVIs:
Competing Interps USE COMPETING INTERPS: | 2/21/22 |
1 - Must not have two advocaciesTournament: Columbia | Round: Quarters | Opponent: San Mateo YR | Judge: Andrea Reier, Kevin Wang, Forrest Weintraub Standards:
Voter – advocacy skills Implication DROP THE DEBATER: Implication DROP THE DEBATER: No RVIs NO RVIs:
| 2/21/22 |
1 - Resilience DATournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Judge: Ausha Curry James 1 The aff’s appeals to “ ” endorse the politics of capitalistic RESILIENCE – their PERFORMANCE is packaged as a 6-minute, consumable product that endorses “Parrhesia” to counteract anti-Blackness. Neoliberalism co-opts this incandescence (or at least the most visible, legible part of its spectrum), domesticating its critical force into the means of producing aesthetic pleasure and reproducing social normativity. Potentiality has been “upgraded” into resilience.9 In resilient art, formal experimentation cultivates, or incites (to use a more Foucaultian term), shocks and feeds the resultant shockwaves back into the system.10 This feedback supports rather than destabilizes hegemonic institutions. The aesthetic damage through which modernist art established its heteronomous/ autonomous position of critique—stuttering, fragmented, degraded, aleatory, dissonant—is now the very medium of normalization.11 Neoliberal resilience, in other words, is a method or process of recycling modernist damage. For example, if modernist art invested aesthetic pleasure in the objectification of women (what Laura Mulvey famously calls scopophilia), neoliberal art invests aesthetic pleasure in women’s spectacular assumption of subjectivity—what Ziarek calls incandescence. If in modernity we liked doing damage to women, we now like to see women overcome that damage.12 This means that we expect women to perform their damage as a baseline from which “good” women then progress. That damage is the fuel for incandescent fires, so it must be constantly incited and invoked so that there’s something for incandescent women to ignite. In this way, resilience discourse normalizes traditional patriarchal damage (e.g., the damage of exclusion and objectification) as a systemic or background condition that individual women are then responsible for overcoming. “Undoing . . . feminism while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a wellinformed and even well-intended response to feminism” (McRobbie 1), resilient incandescence is quintessentially postfeminist. We, the audience, use our identification with the resilient heroine as a way to disidentify with and (supposedly) transgress the imperatives of modernist patriarchy. This is why, as Ziarek explains, audiences have a “sympathetic identification with subversive femininity, with the mother avenging the murderous sacrifice of her daughter for political ends, rather than with the murderous father/king” (104). We enjoy women’s spectacular subjectivization (i.e., their overcoming of scopophilic objectification) because this distances us from unfashionable patriarchal formations and tastes (i.e., this latter scopophilia). In postfeminist neoliberalism, “bearing witness to both the destruction of women’s artistic capacities and women’s revolutionary aspirations” (5) becomes a source of aesthetic pleasure not because it’s revolutionary, but because it’s normative. To use Jack Halberstam’s term, we like our women to “go gaga” because this incandescence, this “unpredictable feminine” (114) methodology allows us to eke even more light out of otherwise exhausted enlightenment modernity. If we’ve reached, as Ziarek discusses, the so-called end of art and the end of history (and the end of tonality and the end of representation and, well, the end of modernity), then the only way to find more resources is, like Pixar’s wall-e, by sifting through our vast piles of waste. And in that waste heap is abject femininity (what musicologist Susan Cook calls the feminized “abject popular”). Femininity is abject because its exclusion from patriarchy is what constitutes patriarchy as a coherent system. In both Ziarek’s aesthetics of potentiality and in resilience discourse, women artists do the cultural work of remaking abjection or constitutive exclusion into ecstatic radiance.13 In the former case, that work is revolutionary; in the latter case, that work normalizes. Resilience discourse transposes feminist revolution into a nationalist, patriarchal, white supremacist practice. Take, for example, Katy Perry’s “Firework,” in which the lyrics trace the affective journey from dejection to radiant exceptionality. The song begins by asking listeners to identify with feelings of irrelevance, weakness, loneliness, and hopelessness; it posits and affirms damage, suffering, and pain. But then Perry’s narrator argues that in spite and perhaps because of this damage, the listener has precisely the means to connect to others, to make a difference, to have hope: “There’s a spark in you / You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine.” She uses the metaphor of fireworks (and their association with u.s. Independence Day celebrations) to describe the listener’s self-transformation from black dust to shining light: you may feel like trash, but if you can just light yourself on fire, that trash will burn with a dazzling radiance that lights up the sky, just as it lights up audiences’ faces. Here, Perry transforms abjection—feeling like trash, unmoored, socially dead—into incandescent triumph. In the song, the addressee’s personal triumph evokes u.s. nationalist narratives of overcoming colonization (i.e., the Declaration of Independence, celebrated on the Fourth of July). Feminine incandescence—the transformation of waste and melancholy into glowing potential—is no longer revolutionary. Not only parallel to u.s. nationalism, it is the very means for reproducing normativity. B. Impacts
(d) “Look, I Overcame!” Resilience must be performed explicitly, legibly, and spectacularly. Overcoming is necessary, but insufficient; to count and function as resilience, this overcoming must be accomplished in a visible or otherwise legible and consumable manner. Overcoming is a type of “affective labor” which, as Steven Shaviro puts it, “is productive only to the extent that it is a public performance. It cannot unfold in the hidden depths; it must be visible and audible” (PCA 49n33). In order to tune into feminine resilience and feed it back into its power supply, MRWaSP has to perceive it as such. “Look, I Overcame!” is the resilient subject’s maxim or mantra. Gender and race have always been “visible identities,” to use philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff’s term, identities strongly tied to one’s outward physical appearance. However, gendered/ racialized resilience isn’t visible in the same way that conventional gender and racial identities are visible. To clarify these differences, it’s helpful to think of resilience in terms of a “Look, I Overcame!” imperative. “Look, I Overcame!” is easy to juxtapose to Frantz Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!”, which is the touchstone for his analysis of gendered racialization in “The Fact of Blackness.” In both cases, looking is a means of crafting race/gender identities and distributing white patriarchal privilege. But, in the same way that resilience discourse “upgrades” traditional methods for crafting identities and distributing privilege, the “looking” in “Look, I Overcame!” is an upgrade on the “looking” in “Look, a black person! Negro!” According to Fanon, the exclamation “Look, a Negro!” racializes him as a black man. To be “a Negro” a black person is to be objectified by the white supremacist gaze. This gaze fixes him as an object, rather than an ambiguous transcendence (which is a more nuanced way of describing the existentialist concept of subjectivity). “The black man,” as Fanon argues, “has no ontological resistance for the white man” (BSWM 110) because, as an object and not a mutually-recognized subject, he cannot return the white man’s gaze (“The Look” that is so important to Sartre’s theory of subjectivity in Being and Nothingness). The LIO narrative differs from Fanon’s account in the same way it differs from Iris Young’s account of feminine body comportment: in resilience discourse, objectification isn’t an end but a means. any impediment posed by the damage wrought by the white/male gaze is a necessary prerequisite for subjectivity, agency, and mutual recognition. In other words, being looked at isn’t an impediment, but a resource. Resilience discourse turns objectification (being looked at) into a means of subjectification (overcoming). It also makes looking even more efficient and profitable than simple objectification could ever be. Recognizing and affirming the affective labor of the resilient performer, the spectator feeds the performer’s individual overcoming into a second-order therapeutic narrative: our approbation of her overcoming is evidence of our own overcoming of our past prejudices. This spectator wants to be seen by a wider audience as someone who answers the resilient feminine subject’s hail, “Look, I Overcame!”. Just as individual feminine subjects use their resilience as proof of their own goodness, MRWaSP uses the resilience of its “good girls” as proof that they’re the “good guys”—that its social and ethical practices are truly just, and that we really mean it this time when we say everyone is equal. For example, the “resilience” of “our” women is often contrasted with the supposed “fragility” of ThirdWorld women of color. | 2/21/22 |
1 - SWT K v2Tournament: UPenn | Round: 6 | Opponent: Ridge SN | Judge: Eric He
dbL: eitehr link to the K or presume neg doenst haappen 3. perfroma method of withdrawel forced to imagine structures — Further, their framing of the aff as a 6-minute revolution is a performative link – the aff is only revolutionary because they got up and read it in a public sphere. hedva 2 They adopt a “view from nowhere” – a myth of neutrality that frames the public as an open space for anyone willing to do the work to fight. These reps are rooted in Whiteness – what about people who CAN’T join the public sphere, or those who’ve tried and failed? And assuming progress is possible and things get better is ableist af. There is another problem too. As Judith Butler put it in her 2015 lecture, “Vulnerability and Resistance,” Arendt failed to account for who is allowed in to the public space, of who’s in charge of the public. Or, more specifically, who’s in charge of who gets in. Butler says that there is always one thing true about a public demonstration: the police are already there, or they are coming. This resonates with frightening force when considering the context of Black Lives Matter. The inevitability of violence at a demonstration – especially a demonstration that emerged to insist upon the importance of bodies who’ve been violently un-cared for – ensures that a certain amount of people won’t, because they can’t, show up. Couple this with physical and mental illnesses and disabilities that keep people in bed and at home, and we must contend with the fact that many whom these protests are for, are not able to participate in them – which means they are not able to be visible as political activists. There was a Tumblr post that came across my dash during these weeks of protest, that said something to the effect of: “shout out to all the disabled people, sick people, people with PTSD, anxiety, etc., who can’t protest in the streets with us tonight. Your voices are heard and valued, and with us.” Heart. Reblog. So, as I lay there, unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any traditional capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? 2. I have chronic illness. For those who don’t know what chronic illness means, let me help: the word “chronic” comes from the Latin chronos, which means “of time” (think of “chronology”), and it specifically means “a lifetime.” So, a chronic illness is an illness that lasts a lifetime. In other words, it does not get better. There is no cure. And think about the weight of time: yes, that means you feel it every day. On very rare occasions, I get caught in a moment, as if something’s plucked me out of the world, where I realize that I haven’t thought about my illnesses for a few minutes, maybe a few precious hours. These blissful moments of oblivion are the closest thing to a miracle that I know. When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy. It costs you to do anything: to get out of bed, to cook for yourself, to get dressed, to answer an email. For those without chronic illness, you can spend and spend without consequence: the cost is not a problem. For those of us with limited funds, we have to ration, we have a limited supply: we often run out before lunch. I’ve come to think about chronic illness in other ways. Ann Cvetkovich writes: “What if depression, in the Americas, at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to be biochemical imbalances?” I’d like to change the word “depression” here to be all mental illnesses. Cvetkovich continues: “Most medical literature tends to presume a white and middle-class subject for whom feeling bad is frequently a mystery because it doesn’t fit a life in which privilege and comfort make things seem fine on the surface.” In other words, wellness as it is talked about in America today, is a white and wealthy idea. Let me quote Starhawk, in the preface to the new edition of her 1982 book Dreaming the Dark: “Psychologists have constructed a myth – that somewhere there exists some state of health which is the norm, meaning that most people presumably are in that state, and those who are anxious, depressed, neurotic, distressed, or generally unhappy are deviant.” I’d here supplant the word “psychologists” with “white supremacy,” “doctors,” “your boss,” “neoliberalism,” “heteronormativity,” and “America.” There has been a slew of writing in recent years about how “female” pain is treated – or rather, not treated as seriously as men’s in emergency rooms and clinics, by doctors, specialists, insurance companies, families, husbands, friends, the culture at large. In a recent article in The Atlantic, called “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” a husband writes about the experience of his wife Rachel’s long wait in the ER before receiving the medical attention her condition warranted (which was an ovarian torsion, where an ovarian cyst grows so large it falls, twisting the fallopian tube). “Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours,” he writes. At the end of the ordeal, Rachel had waited nearly fifteen hours before going into the surgery she should have received upon arrival. The article concludes with her physical scars healing, but that “she’s still grappling with the psychic toll – what she calls ‘the trauma of not being seen.’” What the article does not mention is race – which leads me to believe that the writer and his wife are white. Whiteness is what allows for such oblivious neutrality: it is the premise of blankness, the presumption of the universal. (Studies have shown that white people will listen to other white people when talking about race, far more openly than they will to a person of color. As someone who is white-passing, let me address white people directly: look at my white face and listen up.) The trauma of not being seen. Again – who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible? I don’t mean to diminish Rachel’s horrible experience – I myself once had to wait ten hours in an ER to be diagnosed with a burst ovarian cyst – I only wish to point out the presumptions upon which her horror relies: that our vulnerability should be seen and honored, and that we should all receive care, quickly and in a way that “respects the autonomy of the patient,” as the Four Principles of Biomedical Ethics puts it. Of course, these presumptions are what we all should have. But we must ask the question of who is allowed to have them. In whom does society substantiate such beliefs? And in whom does society enforce the opposite? Compare Rachel’s experience at the hands of the medical establishment with that of Kam Brock’s. In September 2014, Brock, a 32-year-old black woman, born in Jamaica and living in New York City, was driving a BMW when she was pulled over by the police. They accused her of driving under the influence of marijuana, and though her behavior and their search of her car yielded nothing to support this, they nevertheless impounded her car. According to a lawsuit brought against the City of New York and Harlem Hospital by Brock, when Brock appeared the next day to retrieve her car she was arrested by the police for behaving in a way that she calls “emotional,” and involuntarily hospitalized in the Harlem Hospital psych ward. (As someone who has also been involuntarily hospitalized for behaving “too” emotionally, this story feels like a rip of recognition through my brain.) The doctors thought she was “delusional” and suffering from bipolar disorder, because she claimed that Obama followed her on twitter – which was true, but which the medical staff failed to confirm. She was then held for eight days, forcibly injected with sedatives, made to ingest psychiatric medication, attend group therapy, and stripped. The medical records of the hospital – obtained by her lawyers – bear this out: the “master treatment plan” for Brock’s stay reads, “Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.” It notes her “inability to test reality.” Upon her release, she was given a bill for $13,637.10. The question of why the hospital’s doctors thought Brock “delusional” because of her Obama-follow claim is easily answered: Because, according to this society, a young black woman can’t possibly be that important – and for her to insist that she is must mean she’s “sick.” 3. Before I can speak of the “sick woman” in all of her many guises, I must first speak as an individual, and address you from my particular location. I am antagonistic to the notion that the Western medical-insurance industrial complex understands me in my entirety, though they seem to think they do. They have attached many words to me over the years, and though some of these have provided articulation that was useful – after all, no matter how much we are working to change the world, we must still find ways of coping with the reality at hand – first I want to suggest some other ways of understanding my “illness.” Perhaps it can all be explained by the fact that my Moon’s in Cancer in the 8th House, the House of Death, or that my Mars is in the 12th House, the House of Illness, Secrets, Sorrow, and Self-Undoing. Or, that my father’s mother escaped from North Korea in her childhood and hid this fact from the family until a few years ago, when she accidentally let it slip out, and then swiftly, revealingly, denied it. Or, that my mother suffers from undiagnosed mental illness that was actively denied by her family, and was then exasperated by a 40-year-long drug addiction, sexual trauma, and hepatitis from a dirty needle, and to this day remains untreated, as she makes her way in and out of jails, squats, and homelessness. Or, that I was physically and emotionally abused as a child, raised in an environment of poverty, addiction, and violence, and have been estranged from my parents for 13 years. Perhaps it’s because I’m poor – according to the IRS, in 2014, my adjusted gross income was $5,730 (a result of not being well enough to work full-time) – which means that my health insurance is provided by the state of California (Medi-Cal), that my “primary care doctor” is a group of physician’s assistants and nurses in a clinic on the second floor of a strip mall, and that I rely on food stamps to eat. Perhaps it can be encapsulated in the word “trauma.” Perhaps I’ve just got thin skin, and have had some bad luck. It’s important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me – whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary: “This is the oppressor’s language,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1971, “yet I need it to talk to you.” But let me offer another language, too. In the Native American Cree language, the possessive noun and verb of a sentence are structured differently than in English. In Cree, one does not say, “I am sick.” Instead, one says, “The sickness has come to me.” I love that and want to honor it. So, here is what has come to me: Endometriosis, which is a disease of the uterus where the uterine lining grows where it shouldn’t – in the pelvic area mostly, but also anywhere, the legs, abdomen, even the head. It causes chronic pain; gastrointestinal chaos; epic, monstrous bleeding; in some cases, cancer; and means that I have miscarried, can’t have children, and have several surgeries to look forward to. When I explained the disease to a friend who didn’t know about it, she exclaimed: “So your whole body is a uterus!” That’s one way of looking at it, yes. (Imagine what the Ancient Greek doctors – the fathers of the theory of the “wandering womb” – would say about that.) It means that every month, those rogue uterine cells that have implanted themselves throughout my body, “obey their nature and bleed,” to quote fellow endo warrior Hilary Mantel. This causes cysts, which eventually burst, leaving behind bundles of dead tissue like the debris of little bombs. Bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and depersonalization disorder have also come to me. This means that I live between this world and another one, one created by my own brain that has ceased to be contained by a discrete concept of “self.” Because of these “disorders,” I have access to incredibly vivid emotions, flights of thought, and dreamscapes, to the feeling that my mind has been obliterated into stars, to the sensation that I have become nothingness, as well as to intense ecstasies, raptures, sorrows, and nightmarish hallucinations. I have been hospitalized, voluntarily and involuntarily, because of it, and one of the medications I was prescribed once nearly killed me – it produces a rare side effect where one’s skin falls off. Another cost $800 a month – I only took it because my doctor slipped me free samples. If I want to be able to hold a job – which this world has decided I ought to be able to do – I must take an anti-psychotic medication daily that causes short-term memory loss and drooling, among other sexy side effects. These visitors have also brought their friends: nervous breakdowns, mental collapses, or whatever you want to call them, three times in my life. I’m certain they will be guests in my house again. They have motivated attempts at suicide (most of them while dissociated) more than a dozen times, the first one when I was nine years old. That first attempt didn’t work, only because after taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, I somehow woke up the next day and went to school, like nothing had happened. I told no one about it, until my first psychiatric evaluation in my mid 20s. Finally, an autoimmune disease that continues to baffle all the doctors I’ve seen, has come to me and refuses still to be named. As Carolyn Lazard has written about her experiences with autoimmune diseases: “Autoimmune disorders are difficult to diagnose. For ankylosing spondylitis, the average time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis is eight to twelve years. I was lucky; I only had to wait one year.” Names like “MS,” “fibromyalgia,” and others that I can’t remember have fallen from the mouths of my doctors – but my insurance won’t cover the tests, nor is there a specialist in my insurance plan within one hundred miles of my home. I don’t have enough space here – will I ever? – to describe what living with an autoimmune disease is like. I can say it brings unimaginable fatigue, pain all over all the time, susceptibility to illnesses, a body that performs its “normal” functions monstrously abnormally. The worst symptom that mine brings is chronic shingles. For ten years I’ve gotten shingles in the same place on my back, so that I now have nerve damage there, which results in a ceaseless, searing pain on the skin and a dull, burning ache in the bones. hedva 3 Reject their representations of liberation or progress and endorse Sick Woman Theory as a survival strategy for oppressed people. This means re-centering the discussion to oppose incorporation into oppressive structures. It is NOT the burden of the oppressed to fix the world around them – instead, an ethic of care for self and others should replace the call for public protest. SOLVES CAP AND ROOT CAUSE CLAIMS. Despite taking daily medication that is supposed to “suppress” the shingles virus, I still get them – they are my canaries in the coalmine, the harbingers of at least three weeks to be spent in bed. My acupuncturist described it as a little demon steaming black smoke, frothing around, nestling into my bones. 4. With all of these visitors, I started writing Sick Woman Theory as a way to survive in a reality that I find unbearable, and as a way to bear witness to a self that does not feel like it can possibly be “mine.” The early instigation for the project of “Sick Woman Theory,” and how it inherited its name, came from a few sources. One was in response to Audrey Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory,” which proposes a way of redefining historically feminized pathologies into modes of political protest for girls: I was mainly concerned with the question of what happens to the sad girl when, if, she grows up. Another was incited by reading Kate Zambreno’s fantastic Heroines, and feeling an itch to fuck with the concept of “heroism” at all, and so I wanted to propose a figure with traditionally anti-heroic qualities – namely illness, idleness, and inaction – as capable of being the symbol of a grand Theory. Another was from the 1973 feminist book Complaints and Disorders, which differentiates between the “sick woman” of the white upper class, and the “sickening women” of the non-white working class. Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival. It’s for my fellow spoonies. You know who you are, even if you’ve not been attached to a diagnosis: one of the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to resist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, so that they can try to fix you. You don’t need to be fixed, my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing. I offer this as a call to arms and a testimony of recognition. I hope that my thoughts can provide articulation and resonance, as well as tools of survival and resilience. And for those of you who are not chronically ill or disabled, Sick Woman Theory asks you to stretch your empathy this way. To face us, to listen, to see. 5. Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. To take the term “woman” as the subject-position of this work is a strategic, all-encompassing embrace and dedication to the particular, rather than the universal. Though the identity of “woman” has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans and genderfluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than. The problematics of this term will always require critique, and I hope that Sick Woman Theory can help undo those in its own way. They add: | 2/21/22 |
1 - Sick Woman Theory KTournament: Grapevine | Round: 3 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Judge: Micah Thode ROJ and Dolmage 1 I negate. Disability HAS to be the first and last question of this debate – any other starting point mystifies a larger network of ableist knowledge production. The Role of the Judge is to Check Ableist Pedagogical Agendas, which means they must actively identify and respond to the ableist underpinnings of educational spaces. Disavowing disability is in no body’s best interest. Teachers recognize the diversity of the students they teach. But teachers must also recognize their roles within institutions, disciplines, and perhaps even personal pedagogical agendas, in which they may seek to avoid and disavow the very idea of disability—to give it no place. This avoidance and disavowal brings with it its own spatial metaphors—I use the steep steps to express this negative force. That these steps are real in the lives of people with disabilities adds to the power of the metaphor. The steps have a strong connotation in the disability community, and not just for people who use wheelchairs and crutches. When I say that the academy builds steep steps, I hope that this verb entails many things—most of all, I want to show that the steep steps are constructed for a reason. As I have already shown, not only did eugenics actually reshape the North American population through things like immigration restriction, not only did it reshape families through its campaigns for “better breeding,” not only did it reshape bodies through medical reinvention, but it reshaped how North Americans thought about bodies and minds. Here, for example, is a diagram of the steps that were created to distinguish between different grades of the “feeble-minded” in the United States in the heyday of the eugenics movement before the Second World War. The definitions were used to classify a group of humans according to mental age, suggesting that development had been arrested and would proceed no further past the step at which the individual was placed. The mental age was determined based upon variations of a standard test, the Binet test, which asked literally hundreds of standard common-knowledge questions, of increasing difficulty. The test was also designed to stop the subject once they had reached the stage or step of difficulty at which they could proceed no further. Fig. 3. “Exhibit of Work and Educational Campaign for Juvenile Mental Defectives.” American Philosophical Society, 1906. Fig. 3. “Exhibit of Work and Educational Campaign for Juvenile Mental Defectives.” American Philosophical Society, 1906. This image shows five people, each stationed on one of five very steep steps. The bottom person, slouched on the ground, is labeled an “idiot, mentally 3 yrs. old.” On the next step up, an individual is hunched over, looking downwards, labeled “low-grade imbecile, 4 to 5 yrs. old.” Next step up, a “medium imbecile, mentally 6 to 8 yrs. old.” Then a “high grade imbecile, mentally 8 to 10 yrs. Old” is pictured on the next step up, now gazing upwards. Finally, we view a person, described in the caption as a “moron, mentally 10 to 12 years old,” attempting to climb above the final and topmost step but only getting halfway up. As the image reveals, the steps were also closely associated with forms of work, and thus classed citizens and linked their value to this labor-output, but also placed almost all of the feebleminded below reason and judgment, not only in a space of rational vacuity, but deficit. You’ll also notice that the bodily bearing of these individuals conveys a message: the different levels of animation suggest physical and cognitive correlation. These people look tired. The disabled mind equates with the disabled body. These states correspond with affects: the slumped shoulders and downcast eyes suggest or physicalize depression. If these steps in the image on the next page represent the very bottom of the steep set we climb to the ivory tower, they nonetheless cannot be disconnected from the history of North American higher education. In fact, “morons,” “imbeciles,” and “idiots” were both rhetorically (and eugenically) constructed by the “fathers” of higher education, and those individuals who were given these labels were also studied and researched.10 At the top of the steps were those who taught and studied at premier universities, and these people studied and experimented upon the bodies of those on the bottom steps. We may like to believe that, today, practices of eugenics have not only been rejected but that they’ve also been corrected. Yet the selectivity of this environment must be continually interrogated or questioned. We must all evaluate the ways in which we ourselves continue to decide which bodies and which minds will have access to the considerable resources, privileges, and advantages we have and we bestow—and as we ask this question, we must wonder whether what we have to offer is truly worthwhile if it translates into policies of exclusion, programs of incarceration, and reductive definitions of human worth. Interrogating the steep steps metaphor works to highlight not just how space and spatialization are exclusionary but also the ways that the distance between a hypothetical “us” and a “them,” perhaps the able and the disabled, has a particular structure. Yet we must look at the steps from other angles, along other axes. What are the attitudes, requirements, and practices that might represent boundaries, jumps on the graph, risers on the steps? Are there chutes, or are there ladders, set up to speed movement from top to bottom or bottom to top? What forces move up and down, affecting students’ progress? Should we even want to get to the top? How do students go back down the steps or out of the university gates and back to home communities? What makes this journey possible or impossible? What does it mean to skip the steps? Where do the steps actually start? ROB and Dolmage 2 The Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Debater who Better Challenges the Exclusion of Educational Spaces. This is uniquely key on this topic, as the existence of disability turns colleges into labor-intensive asylums. Interrogating ableism is key to understanding education itself. They were “in every sense apart from society”; “All of the institutional routines were segmented into carefully defined blocks of time, scrupulously maintained and punctuated by bells”; The routine was based on “work and solitude . . . steady labor and isolation” in which individuals are enveloped in the same work in a parallel way; They began as orderly and eventually became overcrowded and corrupt; They all housed the lowest orders of society. (xxv) What is ironic about this list is that if you flip a few key points, you have a great description of the universities also being developed in the same period: fully removed, rigidly patterned, isolating, labor-intensive, increasingly corrupted and corruptible, but for only the highest orders of society. Perhaps the university should always have been thought of as similar to other “total institutions”—to borrow Erving Goffman’s term. Perhaps the college or university is in fact exactly the same as the almshouse or asylum, organizationally and even architecturally. And yet it is viewed as the opposite. Thus the subjects in one total institution, the college, are elevated. The inmates in the other spaces are confined. Importantly: one studies; the other is studied. As Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have shown, “historically, disabled people have been the objects of study but not the purveyors of the knowledge base of disability” (Cultural, 198). As Tanya Titchkosky writes, “disabled people are socially organized under the rubric of knowledge bases . . . within the everyday practices and procedures of university environments, for example, we think of disability as a problem in need of a solution” and not as an “important form of critical knowledge production within the university” (Question, 70). Disability is studied; people with disabilities have been research resources. More than this, higher education has been built upon such research. It is important to map the history of this research, but also to intervene in showing some of the ways that we might hope higher education can be redesigned. We need to understand how universities work to fully understand disability. Inversely, we really need to understand disability to understand the history and the future of higher education. hedva 1 The aff’s appeals to change, progress, and revolution equate the political with action – that requires the oppressed to position themselves in the public sphere and “do something.”
I’ll isolate specific links in the aff – their role of the ballot is… insert links.
2. They say they “hijack communicate spheres” — means they present the aff as actively doing something to affect disability Further, their framing of the aff as a 6-minute revolution is a performative link – the aff is only revolutionary because they got up and read it in a public sphere. hedva 2 They adopt a “view from nowhere” – a myth of neutrality that frames the public as an open space for anyone willing to do the work to fight. These reps are rooted in Whiteness – what about people who CAN’T join the public sphere, or those who’ve tried and failed? And assuming progress is possible and things get better is ableist af. There is another problem too. As Judith Butler put it in her 2015 lecture, “Vulnerability and Resistance,” Arendt failed to account for who is allowed in to the public space, of who’s in charge of the public. Or, more specifically, who’s in charge of who gets in. Butler says that there is always one thing true about a public demonstration: the police are already there, or they are coming. This resonates with frightening force when considering the context of Black Lives Matter. The inevitability of violence at a demonstration – especially a demonstration that emerged to insist upon the importance of bodies who’ve been violently un-cared for – ensures that a certain amount of people won’t, because they can’t, show up. Couple this with physical and mental illnesses and disabilities that keep people in bed and at home, and we must contend with the fact that many whom these protests are for, are not able to participate in them – which means they are not able to be visible as political activists. There was a Tumblr post that came across my dash during these weeks of protest, that said something to the effect of: “shout out to all the disabled people, sick people, people with PTSD, anxiety, etc., who can’t protest in the streets with us tonight. Your voices are heard and valued, and with us.” Heart. Reblog. So, as I lay there, unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any traditional capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? 2. I have chronic illness. For those who don’t know what chronic illness means, let me help: the word “chronic” comes from the Latin chronos, which means “of time” (think of “chronology”), and it specifically means “a lifetime.” So, a chronic illness is an illness that lasts a lifetime. In other words, it does not get better. There is no cure. And think about the weight of time: yes, that means you feel it every day. On very rare occasions, I get caught in a moment, as if something’s plucked me out of the world, where I realize that I haven’t thought about my illnesses for a few minutes, maybe a few precious hours. These blissful moments of oblivion are the closest thing to a miracle that I know. When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy. It costs you to do anything: to get out of bed, to cook for yourself, to get dressed, to answer an email. For those without chronic illness, you can spend and spend without consequence: the cost is not a problem. For those of us with limited funds, we have to ration, we have a limited supply: we often run out before lunch. I’ve come to think about chronic illness in other ways. Ann Cvetkovich writes: “What if depression, in the Americas, at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to be biochemical imbalances?” I’d like to change the word “depression” here to be all mental illnesses. Cvetkovich continues: “Most medical literature tends to presume a white and middle-class subject for whom feeling bad is frequently a mystery because it doesn’t fit a life in which privilege and comfort make things seem fine on the surface.” In other words, wellness as it is talked about in America today, is a white and wealthy idea. Let me quote Starhawk, in the preface to the new edition of her 1982 book Dreaming the Dark: “Psychologists have constructed a myth – that somewhere there exists some state of health which is the norm, meaning that most people presumably are in that state, and those who are anxious, depressed, neurotic, distressed, or generally unhappy are deviant.” I’d here supplant the word “psychologists” with “white supremacy,” “doctors,” “your boss,” “neoliberalism,” “heteronormativity,” and “America.” There has been a slew of writing in recent years about how “female” pain is treated – or rather, not treated as seriously as men’s in emergency rooms and clinics, by doctors, specialists, insurance companies, families, husbands, friends, the culture at large. In a recent article in The Atlantic, called “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” a husband writes about the experience of his wife Rachel’s long wait in the ER before receiving the medical attention her condition warranted (which was an ovarian torsion, where an ovarian cyst grows so large it falls, twisting the fallopian tube). “Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours,” he writes. At the end of the ordeal, Rachel had waited nearly fifteen hours before going into the surgery she should have received upon arrival. The article concludes with her physical scars healing, but that “she’s still grappling with the psychic toll – what she calls ‘the trauma of not being seen.’” What the article does not mention is race – which leads me to believe that the writer and his wife are white. Whiteness is what allows for such oblivious neutrality: it is the premise of blankness, the presumption of the universal. (Studies have shown that white people will listen to other white people when talking about race, far more openly than they will to a person of color. As someone who is white-passing, let me address white people directly: look at my white face and listen up.) The trauma of not being seen. Again – who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible? I don’t mean to diminish Rachel’s horrible experience – I myself once had to wait ten hours in an ER to be diagnosed with a burst ovarian cyst – I only wish to point out the presumptions upon which her horror relies: that our vulnerability should be seen and honored, and that we should all receive care, quickly and in a way that “respects the autonomy of the patient,” as the Four Principles of Biomedical Ethics puts it. Of course, these presumptions are what we all should have. But we must ask the question of who is allowed to have them. In whom does society substantiate such beliefs? And in whom does society enforce the opposite? Compare Rachel’s experience at the hands of the medical establishment with that of Kam Brock’s. In September 2014, Brock, a 32-year-old black woman, born in Jamaica and living in New York City, was driving a BMW when she was pulled over by the police. They accused her of driving under the influence of marijuana, and though her behavior and their search of her car yielded nothing to support this, they nevertheless impounded her car. According to a lawsuit brought against the City of New York and Harlem Hospital by Brock, when Brock appeared the next day to retrieve her car she was arrested by the police for behaving in a way that she calls “emotional,” and involuntarily hospitalized in the Harlem Hospital psych ward. (As someone who has also been involuntarily hospitalized for behaving “too” emotionally, this story feels like a rip of recognition through my brain.) The doctors thought she was “delusional” and suffering from bipolar disorder, because she claimed that Obama followed her on twitter – which was true, but which the medical staff failed to confirm. She was then held for eight days, forcibly injected with sedatives, made to ingest psychiatric medication, attend group therapy, and stripped. The medical records of the hospital – obtained by her lawyers – bear this out: the “master treatment plan” for Brock’s stay reads, “Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.” It notes her “inability to test reality.” Upon her release, she was given a bill for $13,637.10. The question of why the hospital’s doctors thought Brock “delusional” because of her Obama-follow claim is easily answered: Because, according to this society, a young black woman can’t possibly be that important – and for her to insist that she is must mean she’s “sick.” 3. Before I can speak of the “sick woman” in all of her many guises, I must first speak as an individual, and address you from my particular location. I am antagonistic to the notion that the Western medical-insurance industrial complex understands me in my entirety, though they seem to think they do. They have attached many words to me over the years, and though some of these have provided articulation that was useful – after all, no matter how much we are working to change the world, we must still find ways of coping with the reality at hand – first I want to suggest some other ways of understanding my “illness.” Perhaps it can all be explained by the fact that my Moon’s in Cancer in the 8th House, the House of Death, or that my Mars is in the 12th House, the House of Illness, Secrets, Sorrow, and Self-Undoing. Or, that my father’s mother escaped from North Korea in her childhood and hid this fact from the family until a few years ago, when she accidentally let it slip out, and then swiftly, revealingly, denied it. Or, that my mother suffers from undiagnosed mental illness that was actively denied by her family, and was then exasperated by a 40-year-long drug addiction, sexual trauma, and hepatitis from a dirty needle, and to this day remains untreated, as she makes her way in and out of jails, squats, and homelessness. Or, that I was physically and emotionally abused as a child, raised in an environment of poverty, addiction, and violence, and have been estranged from my parents for 13 years. Perhaps it’s because I’m poor – according to the IRS, in 2014, my adjusted gross income was $5,730 (a result of not being well enough to work full-time) – which means that my health insurance is provided by the state of California (Medi-Cal), that my “primary care doctor” is a group of physician’s assistants and nurses in a clinic on the second floor of a strip mall, and that I rely on food stamps to eat. Perhaps it can be encapsulated in the word “trauma.” Perhaps I’ve just got thin skin, and have had some bad luck. It’s important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me – whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary: “This is the oppressor’s language,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1971, “yet I need it to talk to you.” But let me offer another language, too. In the Native American Cree language, the possessive noun and verb of a sentence are structured differently than in English. In Cree, one does not say, “I am sick.” Instead, one says, “The sickness has come to me.” I love that and want to honor it. So, here is what has come to me: Endometriosis, which is a disease of the uterus where the uterine lining grows where it shouldn’t – in the pelvic area mostly, but also anywhere, the legs, abdomen, even the head. It causes chronic pain; gastrointestinal chaos; epic, monstrous bleeding; in some cases, cancer; and means that I have miscarried, can’t have children, and have several surgeries to look forward to. When I explained the disease to a friend who didn’t know about it, she exclaimed: “So your whole body is a uterus!” That’s one way of looking at it, yes. (Imagine what the Ancient Greek doctors – the fathers of the theory of the “wandering womb” – would say about that.) It means that every month, those rogue uterine cells that have implanted themselves throughout my body, “obey their nature and bleed,” to quote fellow endo warrior Hilary Mantel. This causes cysts, which eventually burst, leaving behind bundles of dead tissue like the debris of little bombs. Bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and depersonalization disorder have also come to me. This means that I live between this world and another one, one created by my own brain that has ceased to be contained by a discrete concept of “self.” Because of these “disorders,” I have access to incredibly vivid emotions, flights of thought, and dreamscapes, to the feeling that my mind has been obliterated into stars, to the sensation that I have become nothingness, as well as to intense ecstasies, raptures, sorrows, and nightmarish hallucinations. I have been hospitalized, voluntarily and involuntarily, because of it, and one of the medications I was prescribed once nearly killed me – it produces a rare side effect where one’s skin falls off. Another cost $800 a month – I only took it because my doctor slipped me free samples. If I want to be able to hold a job – which this world has decided I ought to be able to do – I must take an anti-psychotic medication daily that causes short-term memory loss and drooling, among other sexy side effects. These visitors have also brought their friends: nervous breakdowns, mental collapses, or whatever you want to call them, three times in my life. I’m certain they will be guests in my house again. They have motivated attempts at suicide (most of them while dissociated) more than a dozen times, the first one when I was nine years old. That first attempt didn’t work, only because after taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, I somehow woke up the next day and went to school, like nothing had happened. I told no one about it, until my first psychiatric evaluation in my mid 20s. Finally, an autoimmune disease that continues to baffle all the doctors I’ve seen, has come to me and refuses still to be named. As Carolyn Lazard has written about her experiences with autoimmune diseases: “Autoimmune disorders are difficult to diagnose. For ankylosing spondylitis, the average time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis is eight to twelve years. I was lucky; I only had to wait one year.” Names like “MS,” “fibromyalgia,” and others that I can’t remember have fallen from the mouths of my doctors – but my insurance won’t cover the tests, nor is there a specialist in my insurance plan within one hundred miles of my home. I don’t have enough space here – will I ever? – to describe what living with an autoimmune disease is like. I can say it brings unimaginable fatigue, pain all over all the time, susceptibility to illnesses, a body that performs its “normal” functions monstrously abnormally. The worst symptom that mine brings is chronic shingles. For ten years I’ve gotten shingles in the same place on my back, so that I now have nerve damage there, which results in a ceaseless, searing pain on the skin and a dull, burning ache in the bones. hedva 3 Reject their representations of liberation or progress and endorse Sick Woman Theory as a survival strategy for oppressed people. This means re-centering the discussion to oppose incorporation into oppressive structures. It is NOT the burden of the oppressed to fix the world around them – instead, an ethic of care for self and others should replace the call for public protest. SOLVES CAP AND ROOT CAUSE CLAIMS. Despite taking daily medication that is supposed to “suppress” the shingles virus, I still get them – they are my canaries in the coalmine, the harbingers of at least three weeks to be spent in bed. My acupuncturist described it as a little demon steaming black smoke, frothing around, nestling into my bones. 4. With all of these visitors, I started writing Sick Woman Theory as a way to survive in a reality that I find unbearable, and as a way to bear witness to a self that does not feel like it can possibly be “mine.” The early instigation for the project of “Sick Woman Theory,” and how it inherited its name, came from a few sources. One was in response to Audrey Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory,” which proposes a way of redefining historically feminized pathologies into modes of political protest for girls: I was mainly concerned with the question of what happens to the sad girl when, if, she grows up. Another was incited by reading Kate Zambreno’s fantastic Heroines, and feeling an itch to fuck with the concept of “heroism” at all, and so I wanted to propose a figure with traditionally anti-heroic qualities – namely illness, idleness, and inaction – as capable of being the symbol of a grand Theory. Another was from the 1973 feminist book Complaints and Disorders, which differentiates between the “sick woman” of the white upper class, and the “sickening women” of the non-white working class. Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival. It’s for my fellow spoonies. You know who you are, even if you’ve not been attached to a diagnosis: one of the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to resist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, so that they can try to fix you. You don’t need to be fixed, my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing. I offer this as a call to arms and a testimony of recognition. I hope that my thoughts can provide articulation and resonance, as well as tools of survival and resilience. And for those of you who are not chronically ill or disabled, Sick Woman Theory asks you to stretch your empathy this way. To face us, to listen, to see. 5. Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. To take the term “woman” as the subject-position of this work is a strategic, all-encompassing embrace and dedication to the particular, rather than the universal. Though the identity of “woman” has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans and genderfluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than. The problematics of this term will always require critique, and I hope that Sick Woman Theory can help undo those in its own way. They add: | 9/11/21 |
1 - Spikes DATournament: Grapevine | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit VC | Judge: Allison Aldridge
The second use of spikes is the attempt to win an argument by not having to defend it. To win the argument because it was conceded rather than because you were able to answer your opponents objections effectively. It seems to me, that the skill set that this reward are not the same skill sets that we want to be assessing when we consider who was the ‘better debater.’ Now I acknowledge that many will disagree about what it mean to be the ‘better debater’ and thus my intuition pump may not generate universal appeal, but it seems to me that being the better debater should track more closely with your ability to defend your arguments, than your ability to hide your arguments. For those to whom that is not intuitive, perhaps the following arguments will provide it more credence (these are more illustrative than anything, I personally think the above intuition pump is just as basic as these). First, I think that evaluating who is the better debater via who dropped spikes excludes lots of specific individuals, especially those with learning disabilities. I have both moderate dyslexia and extreme dysgraphia. Despite debating for four years with a lot of success I was never able to deal with spikes. I could not ‘mind-sweep’ because my flow was not clear enough to find the arguments I needed, and I was simply too slow a reader to be able to reread through the relevant parts of a case during prep-time. I was very lucky, my junior year (which was the first year I really competed on the national circuit) spikes were remarkably uncommon. Looking back it was in many ways the low-point for spike. They started to be used some my senior year but not anything like the extent they are used today. I am entirely confident, however, in saying that if spikes had had anywhere near the same prevalence when I started doing ‘circuit’ debate as they do now, I—with the specific ways that dyslexia/dysgraphia has affected me—would never have bothered to try to debate national circuit LD (I don’t intend to imply this is the same for anyone who has dyslexia or dysgraphia, the particular ways that learning disabilities manifest is often difficult to track). Now, the mere fact that I would have been prevented from succeeding in the activity and possibly from being able to enjoyably compete is not an argument. I never would have been able to succeed at calligraphy, but I would hardly claim we should therefore not make the calligraphy club about handwriting. Instead, what I am suggesting is that the values that debate cares about and should be assessing are not questions of handwriting or notation. We expect notation instrumentally to avoid intervention, but it is not one of the ends of debate in itself. Thus, if there is a viable principle upon which we can decrease this strategic dimension of spikes but maintain non-intervention I think we should do so. I was ‘good’ at philosophy, ‘good’ at argument generation, ‘good’ at research, ‘good’ at casing, ‘great’ at framework comparison etc. It seems to me that as long as I can flow well enough to easily follow a non-tricky aff it was proper that my learning disabilities not be an obstacle to my success. (One other thing to note, while I was a ‘framework debater’ who could never have been good at spikes because of my learning disability I have never met a ‘tricky debater’ who could not have succeeded in debate without tricks simply in virtue of their intelligence and technical proficiency; that is perhaps another reason to favor my account.) 2. McGinnis and Damerdji 1 Second, CAPITALISTIC TECHNOCRACY: their performance turns LD into an incomprehensible game, as knowledge of infinite random “rules” is required for competitive success. LD debate is too esoteric. The skills necessary to be a top-flight national LD debater are increasingly so hyper-specific that they appear arcane to anyone outside the activity — including novices who aspire to it. In the past two years I have had over a dozen potentially talented novices either quit debate entirely or shift to public forum because the idea of spending countless hours learning how to engage the hyper-specific aspects of debate seems pointless to them. Some of the brightest potential students are turned away because (A) they don’t have time to engage in the activity when they are also pursuing a challenging course curriculum, and (B) they recognize that much of the material they learn in LD is of limited-to-no use outside the activity. The increasingly esoteric nature of the activity is a natural result of students and coaches pushing the envelope. LD is no longer simply an application of concepts from other disciplines. With the proliferation of camps and the institutionalization of a continuous national circuit where last year’s top competitors become mentors to (and judges of) this year’s students, LD debate has long engaged in a process of generating its own unique knowledge and meanings. Consider this list of “varsity concepts” that we brainstormed today: Fiat, its uses and abuse Theory spikes in the AC Identifying and responding to NIBs Counter-plans in LD, their use and abuse DAs: Structure and response Plans: How to run them, how to deal with them Meta-ethics: Practical reason Meta-ethics: Naturalism Meta-ethics: Emotivism Truth-testing vs Comparative Worlds Skepticism Ontology generally Epistemology generally Multiple sufficient aff standards – identifying and addressing Meta-theory (and meta-meta-theory, for that matter) Education vs Fairness A few of these topics are of general benefit to critical thinkers, particularly those who plan to study philosophy. but many of these issues — particularly the theoretical ones — have application only in LD debate. I think the problem can break down into three rough areas: 1) The theoretical issues debated in rounds have become so finely detailed that they are taking over the activity; 2) The level of philosophical inquiry has become so sophisticated (and in many cases, ill-conceived) that non-philosophers feel inadequate to the task of coaching or starting programs; and 3) All of this happens at speeds of 300-400 WPM so that any non-debate person unlucky enough to stumble into a round has absolutely no idea (A) what’s going on or (B) how it could possibly be of educational benefit. AND THOSE NOT IN THE KNOW ARE LEFT IN THE COLD. Spending THOUSANDS of dollars a year to go to debate camp is a requirement to compete at the top levels: if you don’t go, you can’t engage. First, it is quite literally a waste of time to learn how to adapt to frivolous rules. The problem is especially poignant for newcomers or anyone with better things to do because every additional wrinkle in the activity increases the learning curve for LD 6. It takes practically two years for debaters to just get the hang of the activity. While there is value in some norms that make LD more insular – like speed and philosophy debate – our activity as a whole is excessively intimidating. A less esoteric, more streamlined activity would turn fewer prospective students off. Even for the debaters who are willing to invest their time to learn debate esoterica, they have more important things to do! LD enjoys the participation of some of the smartest kids in the country. There’s value to them pursuing their academic obligations and other interests. The second disadvantage is that LD becomes less enjoyable when it operates on complicated and unpredictable informal rules. Games are enjoyable primarily because we get to see our efforts pay off in victory. But unpredictable and complicated rules make us more likely to lose unpredictably in virtue of not knowing all the rules. Thus, debate is less enjoyable for as long as you don’t know all the informal norms involved and so lose unpredictably. Third, I worry about the sort of people LD creates when our activity pressures newcomers to embrace many bizarre, highly questionable norms in order to be taken seriously and, consequently, in order to win. Do you remember when you were first told that you must always, always clarify the status of CPs in CX? Or that the magic words “prefer competing interpretations because reasonability is arbitrary” unlocks a trove of easy ways to win on theory? Personally, I pretended this stuff made sense and just went along. Like most LDers who last through senior year, I was deeply invested in LD, saw success in LD as the metric for intelligence, and was willing to jump through all these esoteric hurdles to prove myself. This isn’t good. It has been difficult to change debate’s overly-competitive culture, but it could be easier to ditch the endless number of informal rules and norms that young debaters are pressured to conform to in order to win. LD right now creates fantastic bureaucrats who can cite and manipulate norms to their ends, but there surely would be more value in encouraging real creativity rather than conformity. Of course, many great LDers do creatively re-imagine segments of LD, but this is currently a privilege reserved for the best, while the rest are asked to comply. | 9/16/21 |
1 - White Phil DATournament: Harvard | Round: Triples | Opponent: Dulles VN | Judge: Henry Eberhart Saianurag Karavadi, Ronak Ahuja
Curry and Curry 1: Curry, Tommy J. Tommy, PhD, Prof. of Philosophy @ TAMU, Gwenetta, PhD, Ass. Prof. of Gender and Race Studies @ Alabama, “On the Perils of Race Neutrality and Anti-Blackness: Philosophy as an Irreconcilable Obstacle to (Black) Thought,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, Nos. 3-4 (May-September 2018). DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12244 GC/CH We begin with the first author’s reflections on philosophy and its recurring problem of denying the realities of race and racism, reflections that have arisen as a Black (male) philosopher whose life has been threatened for doing Black philosophy. The experience of confronting death, being fearful of being killed doing my job as a critical race theorist, and being threatened with violence for thinking about racism in America has a profound effect on concretizing what is at stake in our theories about anti-Black racism. Whereas my work on race and racism in philosophy earlier in my career was dedicated to the problems created by the mass ignorance of the discipline to the political debates and ethnological history of Black philosophers in the 19th and 20th centuries, I now find myself thinking more seriously about the way that philosophy, really theory itself—our present categories of knowledge, such as race, class, and gender, found through disciplines—actually hastens the deaths of subjugated peoples in the United States. Academic philosophy routinely abstracts away from—directs thought to not attend to the realities of death, dying, and despair created by—antiBlack racism. Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations are routinely rationalized as disposable flesh. The deaths of these groups launch philosophical discussions of social injustice and spark awareness by whites , while the deaths of white people direct policy and demand outrage. Because racialized bodies are confined to inhumane living conditions that nurture violence and despair that become attributed to the savage nature of nonwhites and evidence of their inhumanity, the deaths of these dehumanized peoples are often measured against the dangers they are thought to pose to others. The interpretation of the inferior position that racialized groups occupy in the United States is grounded in how whites often think of themselves in relation to problem populations. This relationship is often rationalized by avoidance and by the denials of whites about being causally related to the harsh conditions imposed on nonwhites in the world. Philosophy, and its glorification of the rational individual, ignores the complexity of anti-Black racism by blaming the complacency, if not outright hostility, towards Blacks on the mass ignorance of white America. To remedy this problem, Black philosophers are asked to respond by gearing their writings, lectures, and professional presence to further educate and dialogue with white philosophers in order to enable them to better understand anti-Black racism and white supremacy (Curry 2008, 2015). This therapy is often rewarded as scholarship. Philosophical positions that analyze racism as a problem of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and ignorance (philosophies predicated on the capacity of whites to change) are rewarded and praised as the cutting edge and most impactful theories about race and racism. Reducing racism to a problem of recognition and understanding allows white philosophers to remain absolved of their contribution to the apathy that white America has to the death and subjugation Black Americans endure at the hands of the white race. Curry WHITEWASHING DISAD: their attempt to explain racism via an abstract phil framework PERPETUATES ACADEMIC COLONIALISM – it means Black scholarship can only be legitimized through a White gaze. , even while they rhetorically claim they reject such an orientation. Ensuring that young Black philosophers fear being labeled as too radical, or having their work designated as controversial or unsafe, is reason enough to self-censor and revise the original thinking of Black scholars. As such, Black philosophy becomes a discipline accepted as philosophy by the extent to which it mirrors, or Blackfaces, the insights of white thinkers and theories. Philosophy departments have ensured that conversations go unattended that concern the permanence of racism and the histories of trauma and bidirectional violence amongst Blacks (Hernandez et al. 1993; Cascardi and Avery-Leaf 2015; Curry and Utley 2018c). They have also ignored the imperialism and colonial heritage of feminism and the paternal benevolence that white women receive from patriarchal power and sexism, despite decades of research that documents the truth of such positions in the social sciences and history (Newman 1999, 2007; Glick and Fiske 2001). Black philosophy is forced to interpret the world in the most elementary terms of white theory. Ellen Pence, one of the founders of the Duluth model, admitted that she simply made up the idea that patriarchy and sexist attitudes are causally linked to intimate partner violence, but Black philosophy commits itself to propagating this theory despite countless studies showing this is not true in white culture, and has never been the case amongst Blacks (Pence 1999; Mills 2009; Caetano et al. 2005). The intellectual repression of Black philosophers is so severe that popularly held opinions and majority (white) consensus can dictate the interpretations of race, class, and gender amongst Blacks. Many of the theories proposed by Black philosophers concerning racism, intimate partner violence, classism and privilege, underrepresentation, and sexism are routinely found to be out of line with, if not outright rejected by, the scientific accounts of the very same social problems. The social sciences, history, and epidemiology have shown that the causes of social problems in white communities often have very different causes when analyzed in Black or Brown communities. In philosophy, however, there are no distinctions in causation. All social ills stem from ignorance, patriarchy, or some incredibly general theory that often lacks cultural specificity or racial nuance. To appear legitimate, these categories simply mimic the already established thinking of whites and in doing so gain the appearance of truth. No matter the empirical findings or authoritative literatures by experts in other disciplines, all conversations about racism and Black folk that run contrary to the endorsed whites are effectively banned by social stigma and punished through professional ostracism. TURNS AND OUTWEIGHS CASE – they can’t access their framework if they engage in invisibility politics that render Black scholarship irrelevant. | 2/21/22 |
Cites -Tournament: Columbia | Round: 9 | Opponent: all | Judge: alll | 1/30/22 |
JF - Enforcement DATournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: Woodlands PA | Judge: Ronak Ahuja Race is not a perspective on international relations; it is a central organizing feature of world politics. Anti-Japanese racism guided and sustained U.S. engagement in World War II, and broader anti-Asian sentiment influenced the development and structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the Cold War, racism and anti-communism were inextricably linked in the containment strategy that defined Washington’s approach to Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And today race shapes threat perception and responses to violent extremism, inside and outside the “war on terror.” Yet mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship denies race as essential to understanding the world, to the cost of the field’s integrity. Take the “big three” IR paradigms: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. These dominant frames for understanding global politics are built on raced and racist intellectual foundations that limit the field’s ability to answer important questions about international security and organization. Core concepts, like anarchy and hierarchy, are raced: They are rooted in discourses that center and favor Europe and the West. These concepts implicitly and explicitly pit “developed” against “undeveloped,” “modern” against “primitive,” “civilized” against “uncivilized.” And their use is racist: These invented binaries are used to explain subjugation and exploitation around the globe. While realism and liberalism were built on Eurocentrism and used to justify white imperialism, this fact is not widely acknowledged in the field. For instance, according to neorealists, there exists a “balance of power” between and among “great powers.” Most of these great powers are, not incidentally, white-majority states, and they sit atop the hierarchy, with small and notably less-white powers organized below them. In a similar vein, raced hierarchies and conceptions of control ground the concept of cooperation in neoliberal thought: Major powers own the proverbial table, set the chairs, and arrange the place settings. Zvobgo and Loken 2 MASKED IMPERIALISM: states use enforcement to hide racist colonization. Between 1945 and 1993, among the five major IR journals of the period—International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Studies, and World Politics—only one published an article with the word “race” in the title. Another four articles included “minorities” and 13 included “ethnicity.” Since then, mainstream IR has neglected race in theorizing, in historical explanation, and in prescription, and shuttled race (and gender) to the side as “other perspectives.” When IR scholars do engage with race, it is often in discussions of outwardly raced issues such as colonialism. Yet one cannot comprehend world politics while ignoring race and racism. Textbooks that neglect historical and modern slavery when explaining development and globalization obscure the realities of state-building and deny the harms committed in the process. Similarly, when scholarship fails to call attention to the role that race plays in Western nations’ use of international law as a pretext for military intervention, it provides cover for the modern-day equivalent of “civilizing missions.” Likewise, studies of trade and dispute settlement almost always overlook modern arbitration’s deep roots in the transatlantic slave trade. This history is often lost in analyses of wins and losses in negotiations. Race and the racism of historical statecraft are inextricable from the modern study and practice of international relations. They are also not artefacts: Race continues to shape international and domestic threat perceptions and consequent foreign policy; international responses to immigrants and refugees; and access to health and environmental stability. Because mainstream IR does not take race or racism seriously, it also does not take diversity and inclusion in the profession seriously. In the United States, which is the largest producer of IR scholarship, only 8 percent of scholars identify as black or Latino, compared to 12 percent of scholars in comparative politics and 14 percent in U.S. politics. They add: Constructivism, which rounds out the “big three” approaches, is perhaps best positioned to tackle race and racism. Constructivists reject the as-given condition of anarchy and maintain that anarchy, security, and other concerns are socially constructed based on shared ideas, histories, and experiences. Yet with few notable exceptions, constructivists rarely acknowledge how race shapes what is shared. Despite the dominance of the “big three” in the modern study of IR, many of the arguments they advance, such as the balance of power, are not actually supported by evidence outside of modern Europe. Consider the democratic peace theory. The theory makes two key propositions: that democracies are less likely to go to war than are nondemocracies, and that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other. The historical record shows that democracies have actually not been less likely to fight wars—if you include their colonial conquests. Meanwhile, in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, democratizing states have experienced more internal conflicts than their less-democratic peers. Yet leaders in the West have invoked democratic peace theory to justify invading and occupying less-democratic, and notably less-white, countries. This is a key element of IR’s racial exclusion: The state system that IR seeks to explain arises from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and established European principles of statehood and sovereignty. Far from 17th-century relics, these principles are enshrined in the United Nations Charter—the foundation for global governance since 1945. But non-European nations did not voluntarily adopt European understandings of statehood and sovereignty, as IR scholars often mythologize. Instead, Europe, justified by Westphalia, divided the world between the modern, “civilized” states and conquered those which they did not think belonged in the international system. IR scholar Sankaran Krishna has argued that, because IR privileges theorizing over historical description and analysis, the field enables this kind of whitewashing. Western concepts are prioritized at the expense of their applicability in the world. Krishna called this “a systematic politics of forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question of race.” Importantly, IR has not always ignored race. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, foundational texts invoked race as the linchpin holding together colonial administration and war. Belief in white people’s biological and sociological supremacy offered a tidy dualism between the civilized and the savage that justified the former’s murderous exploitation of the latter. Paul Samuel Reinsch, a founder of modern IR and foreign policy, christened the 20th century as the “age of national imperialism.” He concluded that states “endeavor to increase their resources … through the absorption or exploitation of undeveloped regions and inferior races.” Yet, he assured readers that this was “not inconsistent with respect for … other nationalities” because states avoid exerting control over “highly civilized nations.” | 2/21/22 |
JF - Enforcement DATournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: Woodlands PA | Judge: Ronak Ahuja Race is not a perspective on international relations; it is a central organizing feature of world politics. Anti-Japanese racism guided and sustained U.S. engagement in World War II, and broader anti-Asian sentiment influenced the development and structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the Cold War, racism and anti-communism were inextricably linked in the containment strategy that defined Washington’s approach to Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And today race shapes threat perception and responses to violent extremism, inside and outside the “war on terror.” Yet mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship denies race as essential to understanding the world, to the cost of the field’s integrity. Take the “big three” IR paradigms: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. These dominant frames for understanding global politics are built on raced and racist intellectual foundations that limit the field’s ability to answer important questions about international security and organization. Core concepts, like anarchy and hierarchy, are raced: They are rooted in discourses that center and favor Europe and the West. These concepts implicitly and explicitly pit “developed” against “undeveloped,” “modern” against “primitive,” “civilized” against “uncivilized.” And their use is racist: These invented binaries are used to explain subjugation and exploitation around the globe. While realism and liberalism were built on Eurocentrism and used to justify white imperialism, this fact is not widely acknowledged in the field. For instance, according to neorealists, there exists a “balance of power” between and among “great powers.” Most of these great powers are, not incidentally, white-majority states, and they sit atop the hierarchy, with small and notably less-white powers organized below them. In a similar vein, raced hierarchies and conceptions of control ground the concept of cooperation in neoliberal thought: Major powers own the proverbial table, set the chairs, and arrange the place settings. Zvobgo and Loken 2 MASKED IMPERIALISM: states use enforcement to hide racist colonization. Between 1945 and 1993, among the five major IR journals of the period—International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Studies, and World Politics—only one published an article with the word “race” in the title. Another four articles included “minorities” and 13 included “ethnicity.” Since then, mainstream IR has neglected race in theorizing, in historical explanation, and in prescription, and shuttled race (and gender) to the side as “other perspectives.” When IR scholars do engage with race, it is often in discussions of outwardly raced issues such as colonialism. Yet one cannot comprehend world politics while ignoring race and racism. Textbooks that neglect historical and modern slavery when explaining development and globalization obscure the realities of state-building and deny the harms committed in the process. Similarly, when scholarship fails to call attention to the role that race plays in Western nations’ use of international law as a pretext for military intervention, it provides cover for the modern-day equivalent of “civilizing missions.” Likewise, studies of trade and dispute settlement almost always overlook modern arbitration’s deep roots in the transatlantic slave trade. This history is often lost in analyses of wins and losses in negotiations. Race and the racism of historical statecraft are inextricable from the modern study and practice of international relations. They are also not artefacts: Race continues to shape international and domestic threat perceptions and consequent foreign policy; international responses to immigrants and refugees; and access to health and environmental stability. Because mainstream IR does not take race or racism seriously, it also does not take diversity and inclusion in the profession seriously. In the United States, which is the largest producer of IR scholarship, only 8 percent of scholars identify as black or Latino, compared to 12 percent of scholars in comparative politics and 14 percent in U.S. politics. They add: Constructivism, which rounds out the “big three” approaches, is perhaps best positioned to tackle race and racism. Constructivists reject the as-given condition of anarchy and maintain that anarchy, security, and other concerns are socially constructed based on shared ideas, histories, and experiences. Yet with few notable exceptions, constructivists rarely acknowledge how race shapes what is shared. Despite the dominance of the “big three” in the modern study of IR, many of the arguments they advance, such as the balance of power, are not actually supported by evidence outside of modern Europe. Consider the democratic peace theory. The theory makes two key propositions: that democracies are less likely to go to war than are nondemocracies, and that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other. The historical record shows that democracies have actually not been less likely to fight wars—if you include their colonial conquests. Meanwhile, in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, democratizing states have experienced more internal conflicts than their less-democratic peers. Yet leaders in the West have invoked democratic peace theory to justify invading and occupying less-democratic, and notably less-white, countries. This is a key element of IR’s racial exclusion: The state system that IR seeks to explain arises from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and established European principles of statehood and sovereignty. Far from 17th-century relics, these principles are enshrined in the United Nations Charter—the foundation for global governance since 1945. But non-European nations did not voluntarily adopt European understandings of statehood and sovereignty, as IR scholars often mythologize. Instead, Europe, justified by Westphalia, divided the world between the modern, “civilized” states and conquered those which they did not think belonged in the international system. IR scholar Sankaran Krishna has argued that, because IR privileges theorizing over historical description and analysis, the field enables this kind of whitewashing. Western concepts are prioritized at the expense of their applicability in the world. Krishna called this “a systematic politics of forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question of race.” Importantly, IR has not always ignored race. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, foundational texts invoked race as the linchpin holding together colonial administration and war. Belief in white people’s biological and sociological supremacy offered a tidy dualism between the civilized and the savage that justified the former’s murderous exploitation of the latter. Paul Samuel Reinsch, a founder of modern IR and foreign policy, christened the 20th century as the “age of national imperialism.” He concluded that states “endeavor to increase their resources … through the absorption or exploitation of undeveloped regions and inferior races.” Yet, he assured readers that this was “not inconsistent with respect for … other nationalities” because states avoid exerting control over “highly civilized nations.” | 2/21/22 |
JF - Ethnofuturism KTournament: Harvard | Round: 1 | Opponent: Providence AA | Judge: Tahj Johnson Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Thinking, which means helping students develop the skills to question the squo. Thus, I would propose interpreting “one-dimensional” as conforming to existing thought and behavior and lacking a critical dimension and a dimension of potentialities that transcend the existing society. In Marcuse's usage the adjective “one-dimensional” describes practices that conform to pre-existing structures, norms, and behavior, in contrast to multidimensional discourse, which focuses on possibilities that transcend the established state of affairs. This epistemological distinction presupposes antagonism between subject and object so that the subject is free to perceive possibilities in the world that do not yet exist but which can be realized. In the one-dimensional society, the subject is assimilated into the object and follows the dictates of external, objective norms and structures, thus losing the ability to discover more liberating possibilities and to engage in transformative practice to realize them. Marcuse's theory presupposes the existence of a human subject with freedom, creativity, and self-determination who stands in opposition to an object-world, perceived as substance, which contains possibilities to be realized and secondary qualities like values, aesthetic traits, and aspirations, which can be cultivated to enhance human life. He adds: In his early works, Marcuse himself attempted to synthesize Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism with Marxism, and in One-Dimensional Man one recognizes Husserl and Heideggerian motifs in Marcuse's critiques of scientific civilization and modes of thought. In particular, Marcuse develops a conception of a technological world, similar in some respects to that developed by Heidegger, and, like Husserl and Heidegger, sees technological rationality colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing techno- logical imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior. Marcuse thought that dialectical philosophy could promote critical thinking. One-Dimensional Man is perhaps Marcuse's most sustained attempt to present and develop the categories of the dialectical philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx. For Marcuse, dialectical thinking involved the ability to abstract one's perception and thought from existing forms in order to form more general concepts. This conception helps explain the difficulty of One-Dimensional Man and the demands that it imposes upon its reader. For Marcuse abstracts from the complexity and multiplicity of the existing society its fundamental tendencies and constituents, as well as those categories which constitute for him the forms of critical thinking. This demands that the reader also abstract from existing ways of looking at society and modes of thinking and attempt to perceive and think in a new way. Uncritical thinking derives its beliefs, norms, and values from existing thought and social practices, while critical thought seeks alternative modes of thought and behavior from which it creates a standpoint of critique. Such a critical standpoint requires developing what Marcuse calls “negative thinking,” which “negates” existing forms of thought and reality from the perspective of higher possibilities. This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals' full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one's own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. Philosophy was thus to supply the norms for social criticism and the ideal of liberation which would guide social change and individual self- transformation. Thus, the Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Rejection of One-Dimensional Thought. This means distancing ourselves from essentializing modes of thinking – e.g., the notion that value can only come from money. We measure the standard based on whether we remain open to multiple ways of knowing or approaching problems; the more restrictive the approach, the less we adhere to the framework. 1 The framework says “only consequentialism explains degrees of wrongness” – any time they say things like “only util” is a form of disimagination. They don’t allow for any possibilities beyond the framework they justify. Duren DISIMAGINATION – the aff assumes private companies can only use outer space in ONE WAY, but private non-profits are working to benefit the environment. In a first-of-its-kind coalition to accelerate climate change action, and with help from UArizona researchers, a new nonprofit organization called Carbon Mapper is launching a program to improve scientific understanding of global methane and carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon Mapper, a new nonprofit organization partnering with the University of Arizona, today announced a groundbreaking program to help improve understanding of and accelerate reductions in global methane and carbon dioxide emissions. The Carbon Mapper consortium also announced plans to deploy a satellite constellation to pinpoint, quantify and track methane and carbon dioxide emissions. "This decade represents an all-hands-on-deck moment for humanity to make critical progress in addressing climate change," said Riley Duren, research scientist in the UArizona Office of Research, Innovation and Impact and CEO of Carbon Mapper. "Our mission is to help fill gaps in the emerging global ecosystem of methane and CO2 monitoring systems by delivering data that's timely, actionable and accessible for science-based decision making." Current approaches to measuring methane and carbon dioxide emissions at the scale of individual facilities – particularly intermittent activity – present challenges, especially in terms of transparency, accuracy, scalability and cost. Carbon Mapper – which also is partnering with the state of California, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Planet, Arizona State University, High Tide Foundation and RMI – will help overcome these technological barriers and enable accelerated action by making publicly available high emitting methane and carbon dioxide sources quickly and persistently visible at the facility level. The data collected by the Carbon Mapper constellation of satellites will provide more complete, precise and timely measurement of methane and carbon dioxide source level emissions as well as more than 25 other environmental indicators. Through the Carbon Mapper-UArizona partnership, Duren and other UArizona researchers offer scientific leadership of the methane and carbon dioxide emissions data delivery including developing new algorithms and analytic frameworks for testing them with an ongoing research program. "Time is of the essence when it comes to understanding and mitigating methane and CO2 emissions," said Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell. "Partnering with Carbon Mapper will give University of Arizona researchers the tools needed to not only see emissions hot spots, but to understand their causes and develop actionable plans for reducing or eliminating these sources." Carbon Mapper, in collaboration with its public and private partners, is developing the satellite constellation in three phases. The initial study phase, now complete, included two years of preliminary engineering development and manufacturing. The first phase is underway and includes development of the first two satellites by Planet and JPL, scheduled for launch in 2023, accompanying data processing platforms, and ongoing cooperative methane mitigation pilot projects using aircraft in California and other U.S. states. P;’ Arendt ASSUMING PRIVATE ENTITIES CAN ONLY BE BIG CORPORATIONS IS THE ESSENCE OF ONE-DIMENSIONAL THOUGHT – the notion that they can only be used one way utilitarianizes the world and equates “private” with “for-profit.” This makes it impossible to find meaning in anything: if everything’s a means, nothing can be an end. The implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. The end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood. Because of the end product, tools are designed and implements invented, and the same end product organizes the work process itself, decides about the needed specialists, the measure of co-operation, the number of assistants, etc. During the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else. The same standards of means and end apply to the product itself. Though it is an end with respect to the means by which it was produced and is the end of the fabrication process, it never becomes, so to speak, an end in itself, at least not as long as it remains an object for use. The chair which is the end of carpentering can show its usefulness only by again becoming a means, either as a thing whose durability permits its use as a means for comfortable living or as a means of exchange. The trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some other context. In other words, in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends.19 This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen-— like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is "for the sake of" usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of "in order to." The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: "And what is the use of use?" The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness. Within the category of means and end, and among the experiences of instrumentality which rules over the whole world of use objects and utility, there is no way to end the chain of means and ends and prevent all ends from eventually being used again as means, except to declare that one thing or another is "an end in itself." C. Alternative Jones Thus, the alternative is to reject the aff and replace their representations with Ethnofuturism, abbreviated “EF,” a method that emphasizes critical thinking by confronting colonialist capitalism. These manoeuvres to privatise Outer Space rely not only on the enclosure of physical and legislative places but also seek to enclose imaginative spaces through the process(es) of disimagination. Broadly conceived, disimagination is a process that curtails our ability to think critically and imagine new futures through cultural apparatuses and public pedagogies designed to erase the multiplicity of historical realities that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ (Didi-Huberman, 2008: Giroux, 2014). Whilst this concept has been used in Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the destruction of concentration camp materials and Giroux’s work on critical pedagogy and civic rights, the process of disimagination is operating within and upon discourses of Outer Space, as I discuss later in this piece. These attempts at disimagination are not going unchallenged, however, with Ethnofuturist works disrupting the oftentimes de facto futures of Outer Space and asteroid mining. Ethnofuturism critically responds to the disimagination process as it combines the Ethno- (the archaic, indigenous, or cultural histories of peoples) and -futurism (deemed the cosmopolitan, urban, and technological) (Hennoste, 2012). Consequently, Ethnofuturism can be construed as a process by and through which histories that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ are reinvigorated and mobilised to (re)produce alternative discourses of futurity. Ethnofuturism here is used as an umbrella term that contains within it futurisms from a variety of groups and people. Examples of such futurisms include, but are not limited to: Afrofuturism, Aotearoa futurism, Cambrofuturism, and Sinofuturism. The following discusses enclosure, disimagination, and Ethnofuturism to problematise these futures of asteroid mining: highlighting how popular NSE discourses draw upon a Eurocentric rendition of a ‘Grand Historical Narrative’. Through this, we may begin to challenge the totalising concept of ‘humanity’ 4 oft-invoked by asteroid mining advocates and turn a more critical lens to these purported futures and the discourses (re)created to justify them. | 2/21/22 |
JF - Extra TTournament: Columbia | Round: 4 | Opponent: Princeton AS | Judge: Ben Erdmann Oxford Languages Unjust is not based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair Violation They defend that “The appropriation of outer space through asteroid mining by private entities should be banned. “– that’s WAY MORE than the topic, C. Net Benefits
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JF - Justice DATournament: Columbia | Round: Quarters | Opponent: San Mateo YR | Judge: Andrea Reier, Kevin Wang, Forrest Weintraub Forty years ago, John Lennon sang, “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can”. The concept of possession itself is interesting to consider, and investigate, and debate (Curchin, 2007). A recent report explained happiness and well-being as agential flourishing (Raibley, 2012). Possession (ownership) and taking action are concepts that contrast with each other, since the former represents stasis or little movement, and the latter is dynamic and movement itself. Thus, we have arrived at a significant question, psychologically and philosophically: Which is more important to achieve happiness, ownership (possession) or taking action? There is little research about the preference for ownership or taking action in relation to happiness. In this paper, we examine the happiness that people feel from possession or ownership in comparison to the happiness they achieve as a result of taking action. The purpose of this paper is to investigate Japanese people’s preference for ownership (possession) or taking action, to evaluate the correlations of this preference with gender, age, level of education, and annual income, and to discuss reasons for people’s preference. They add: On the other hand, there is little research about the preference for ownership (possession) or taking action in relation to happiness. One reason could be the difficulty in differentiating the terms “taking action”, and “experience”. One possible difference between the terms action and experience might be that people valued taking action for its achievement value, in addition to its experiential value (Nozick, 1974) . According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, action is the doing of something and/or state of being in motion or of working, whereas experience is the act of living through an event or events; personal involvement in or observation of events as they occur. These meanings are similar in Japanese. Taking action might have broader meaning beyond its experiential value (i.e., experiencing an event or events), such as work or achievement of value, and/or volunteering and making charitable contributions. Moreover, happiness from taking action is to some extent different from happiness from experience or experiential purchase, in accordance with the distinction between episodic happiness and well-being (Raibley, 2012) , since experience or experiential purchase is related or connected to an episode, an event, or events. We investigated the preference for ownership (possession) or taking action, in relation to hap- piness, considering that the term taking action included the term experience. We think that ownership is not only related to purchasing behavior, but also related to the monopolization of materials, which is close to being selfish. Psychological study of monopolization materials (Why do some people like to monopolize materials instead of freely transferring them to others?) is a very important and useful topic for the psychology of happiness and/or peace. When we look deeply into the question of ownership, we can find very broad and meaningful aspects in ownership, as like as in taking action. We think that taking action and ownership are also comparable in their broad meanings. Then, we carried out the research about the preference for ownership (possession) or taking action in relation to happiness. Nelson and Block And private property appropriation respects a system of equal freedom. In sharp contrast, each and every transaction that occurs under laissezfaire capitalism can boast volunteerism. When A purchases a pen from B for $1, they both agreed to the transaction. It was unanimous. And the same goes for all other commercial interactions, whether buying or selling, trading or bartering, lending or borrowing, or saving and investing. Thus, if property remains in the private sector, there is no violation of any just law as there is with public property. How can property rights be established? From the libertarian perspective, this is accomplished through homesteading. How does this work? The general rule is simple.8 One mixes his labor with the land, by planting a field or harvesting trees; a man captures and domesticates an animal, or kills one for food. Then, he becomes the owner of the resource owners establishes just title. So, if one man grows corn, and another milks a cow, and then they barter, the farmer owns the milk, even though he did not produce it, as does the rancher the corn, ditto. But, both can trace titles to what they now own to initial homesteading and voluntary interaction. The problem with so-called government ownership is that no politician, no bureaucrat, ever homesteaded or freely traded anything.9 Instead, the king, or the congress, simply declared control over certain territories. But this is on a par with everything else done by this institution. There is no justification, merely the fraudulent claim: “Might makes right.” We therefore conclude that private property, the very basis of the free enterprise system, is justified. Commons What of unowned property not controlled by either government or private individuals? The ethical status of the commons depends upon exactly how and why this occurs. The short answer is, if property is unowned because it is sub-marginal, then all is well. If, on the other hand, this status arises because the state refuses to allow private parties to homestead virgin territory and take ownership over it, then this is contrary to the libertarian ethos. The unowned property itself, of course, is not to blame; it is inanimate. The fault lies with the institution that refuses to allow homesteading and settlement on it. Why is some land sub-marginal? This is because it does not pay to settle on it. The terrain is too rough, or too far away from civilization to be economical, or too dangerous, or for any other reason unsuitable for habitation by any but the heartiest and most adventurous persons and even then, only temporarily. | 2/21/22 |
JF - PWD PICTournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Judge: Ausha Curry Eric Ingram typically moves through the world on his wheelchair. The 31-year-old chief executive of SCOUT Inc., a smart satellite components company, was born with Freeman-Sheldon Syndrome, a rare condition that affects his joints and blocked him from his dream of becoming an astronaut. He applied and was rejected, twice. But onboard a special airplane flight this week, he spun effortlessly through the air, touching nothing. Moving around, he found, was easier in the simulated zero-gravity environment where he needed so few tools to help. While simulating lunar gravity on the flight — which is about one-sixth of Earth’s — he discovered something even more surprising: for the first time in his life, he could stand up. “It was legitimately weird,” he said. “Just the act of standing was probably almost as alien to me as floating in zero gravity.” He was one of 12 disabled passengers who swam through the air aboard a parabolic flight in Southern California last Sunday in an experiment testing how people with disabilities fare in a zero-gravity environment. Parabolic flights, which fly within Earth’s atmosphere in alternating upward and downward arcs, allow passengers to experience zero gravity for repeated short bursts, and are a regular part of training for astronauts. The flight was organized by AstroAccess, a nonprofit initiative that aims to make spaceflight accessible to to all. Although about 600 people have been to space since the beginning of human spaceflight in the 1960s, NASA and other space agencies have long restricted the job of astronaut to a minuscule slice of humanity. The American agency initially only selected white, physically fit men to be astronauts and even when the agency broadened its criteria, it still only chose people that met certain physical requirements. This blocked the path to space for many with disabilities, overlooking arguments that disabled people could make excellent astronauts in some cases. But the rise of private spaceflight, funded by billionaires with the support of government space agencies, is creating the possibility of allowing a much wider and more diverse pool of people to make trips to the edge of space and beyond. And those with disabilities are aiming to be included. The participants in Sunday’s AstroAccess flight argue that accessibility issues must be considered now — at the advent of private space travel — rather than later, because retrofitting equipment to be accessible would take more time and money. The Federal Aviation Administration is prohibited from creating safety regulations for private spaceflights until October 2023. Initiatives like AstroAccess are aiming to guide the way that government agencies think about accessibility on spaceflights. “It’s crucial that we’re able to get out ahead of that regulatory process and prevent misinformation or lack of information or lack of data from making bad regulation that would prevent someone with disability flying on one of these trips,” Mr. Ingram said. The group also hopes that making everything accessible from the get-go could lead to new space innovations that are helpful for everyone, regardless of disability. | 2/21/22 |
JF - T - Appropriation V1Tournament: Columbia | Round: 1 | Opponent: Nashua HS South EG | Judge: Eric He With respect to the concept of appropriation the basic question is what constitutes "appropriation," as used in the Treaty, especially in contradistinction to casual or temporary use. The term "appropriation" is used most frequently to denote the taking of property for one's own or exclusive use with a sense of permanence. Under such interpretation the establishment of a permanent settlement or the carrying out of commercial activities by nationals of a country on a celestial body may constitute national appropriation if the activities take place under the supreme authority (sovereignty) of the state. Short of this, if the state wields no exclusive authority or jurisdiction in relation to the area in question, the answer would seem to be in the negative, unless, the nationals also use their individual appropriations as cover-ups for their state's activities.5 In this connection, it should be emphasized that the word "appropriation" indicates a taking which involves something more than just a casual use. Thus a temporary occupation of a landing site or other area, just like the temporary or nonexclusive use of property, would not constitute appropriation. By the same token, any use involving consumption or taking with intention of keeping for one's own exclusive use would amount to appropriation.
Voter The voter is fairness Implication DROP THE DEBATER: No RVIs NO RVIs: Competing Interps USE COMPETING INTERPS: | 2/21/22 |
JF - T-Private AppropriationTournament: Harvard | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Cooper City NR | Judge: Henry Eberhart, Saianurag Karavadi, Kattichka Cazeau With respect to the concept of appropriation the basic question is what constitutes "appropriation," as used in the Treaty, especially in contradistinction to casual or temporary use. The term "appropriation" is used most frequently to denote the taking of property for one's own or exclusive use with a sense of permanence. Under such interpretation the establishment of a permanent settlement or the carrying out of commercial activities by nationals of a country on a celestial body may constitute national appropriation if the activities take place under the supreme authority (sovereignty) of the state. Short of this, if the state wields no exclusive authority or jurisdiction in relation to the area in question, the answer would seem to be in the negative, unless, the nationals also use their individual appropriations as cover-ups for their state's activities.5 In this connection, it should be emphasized that the word "appropriation" indicates a taking which involves something more than just a casual use. Thus a temporary occupation of a landing site or other area, just like the temporary or nonexclusive use of property, would not constitute appropriation. By the same token, any use involving consumption or taking with intention of keeping for one's own exclusive use would amount to appropriation. 2 TEXTUAL PRECISION: 3) clash - TVA AND THE TVA SOLVES: | 2/21/22 |
JF- Extra T v2Tournament: UPenn | Round: 6 | Opponent: Ridge SN | Judge: Eric He Author The aff must defend only appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust – that means specifically . Gorove Space Law Professor Stephen Gorove defines “appropriation of outer space” as: Gorove, Stephen. Professor of space law and director of space studies and policy, 1991-1998, University of Mississippi “Interpreting Article II of the Outer Space Treaty.” 37 Fordham L. Rev. 349, 1969. https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol37/iss3/2 CH With respect to the concept of appropriation the basic question is what constitutes "appropriation," as used in the Treaty, especially in contradistinction to casual or temporary use. The term "appropriation" is used most frequently to denote the taking of property for one's own or exclusive use with a sense of permanence. Under such interpretation the establishment of a permanent settlement or the carrying out of commercial activities by nationals of a country on a celestial body may constitute national appropriation if the activities take place under the supreme authority (sovereignty) of the state. Short of this, if the state wields no exclusive authority or jurisdiction in relation to the area in question, the answer would seem to be in the negative, unless, the nationals also use their individual appropriations as cover-ups for their state's activities.5 In this connection, it should be emphasized that the word "appropriation" indicates a taking which involves something more than just a casual use. Thus a temporary occupation of a landing site or other area, just like the temporary or nonexclusive use of property, would not constitute appropriation. By the same token, any use involving consumption or taking with intention of keeping for one's own exclusive use would amount to appropriation. B. Violation Author Their plan is to that’s WAY more C. Net Benefits
Its accessibility – t Implication DROP THE DEBATER:
Competing Interps USE COMPETING INTERPS: | 2/21/22 |
ND - Deliberation NCTournament: Apple Valley | Round: 3 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Jason Meyer Simply put, Society is made up of conflicting conceptions of the good, and what justice demands is a set of principles acceptable to all. which can be used to resolve disagreements. Crucially, A liberal constitutional order must be based on ‘authority superior to’ that of’ particular conceptions, of the good, otherwise there is a risk that might makes right. An order where might makes right is problematic from a liberal perspective because Such an order easily violates the foundational ideal of equality. underpinning liberal constitutionalism. People have an interest in resolving such deep disagreements; but it matters to them how these disagreements are resolved. it is important that they feel the political order they have to obey is one that is acceptable and morally justifiable. to them. An important aspect of contemporary political philosophy is to define such a political order. The significance of this point needs to be emphasized. For most members of a society, their lives will go better if not interrupted by social strife and conflict, so the interest and motivation to avoid social conflict is strong. Furthermore, if conflicts and disagreements over deeply held convictions and strong interests can be resolved in ways that are morally justifiable to all members of society this serves as a potentially fruitful political order. In different forms, this issue has preoccupied political philosophers at least since the seventeenth century, and some of the most influential solutions have been cast in terms of a social contract (Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau). Stie Further, pluralism requires that all people have access to deliberation, since this creates publically justifiable procedures and helps people accept even outcomes they dislike. The modern idea of democracy basically amounts to the notion of the self-governing human being and a just society where free and equal individuals give themselves laws which in the next step can be seen as legitimate constraints on their actions. How can this ideal scenario honouring the principle of individual autonomy be translated to real life circumstances? Under conditions of pluralism, where there is no prospect of reaching a consensus on how everyone should live, their life, the way to determine whether decisions are legitimate cannot merely be about their substance. The chance that everyone will find a policy proposal equally good is unrealistic. Consequently, given that the substance of a proposal cannot function as the sole motivation to support a decision, the deliberative argument is that the legitimacy of decisions must first and foremost rest on the decisionmaking procedure itself. The assumption is that If an issue has been properly treated in a fair process, the likelihood that those who were opposed to the outcome will nevertheless respect it, as a legitimate constraint on their behaviour despite the fact that their position was rejected in the final decision-taking moment. The deliberative approach assumes that if there is a prospect for such a fair process preceding decision-making, majority vote can be democratically legitimised. Moreover, when the requirement of a prior process is respected, majority votes “…therefore represent only temporary stops in the continuous discussion about what should be done. Such a procedural interpretation of the majority principle makes it consistent with the concept of freedom when not applied to irreversible decisions. In this way discourse theory allows the individual to submit to laws that are not correct.” (Eriksen, 2006: 13; cf. also Chambers, 2004a: 397). Without such prior processes, on the other hand, the actual act of voting becomes nothing more than an arithmetic number at a given point in time (Eriksen, 2007b: 92-3). Consequently, if fair procedures are established they can provide the reason and motivate for minority positions to support majority decisions and can thus compensate for the unrealistic prospect that everyone will come to agreement on the substance of a decision. How can we reach this goal? We must first of all identify the normative/democratic standard that must be respected. In discourse theory this amounts to the discourse principle: “Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses.” (Habermas, 1998: 107). The discourse principle establishes that legitimate decisions are those that can be consented to after withstanding scrutiny and critique. by those who are going to be bound them. In representative democracies it is, however, not the case that all citizens and all affected parties are involved in actual decision-making. Hence the formulation “… could agree to…” is inserted in order to indicate that the principle can be used as a hypothetical litmus test for assessing the legitimacy of actual decisions (ibid, my emphasis; see also Eriksen 2007b: 93). It should immediately be added that the hypothetical test cannot replace actual public discourse (ibid). A viable democracy cannot do without public debate where policy proposals are tested and discussed in front of and involving the public. at large. What is more, the discourse principle implies that legitimate decisions are achieved linguistically if certain conditions for discourse are met. When translated to the institutional and procedural level, the discourse principle contains “…four ideal claims on institutions and processes: freedom, rationality, equality and publicity.” (Eriksen, 2007b: 95, 96) 4 . The bottom line is that democratically legitimate decisions have been validated through a particular type of process which entails that they have been defended, tested and criticised argumentatively in a publicly accessible debate and that minority positions have been included, listened to and taken into account during the course of a collective and inclusive process (Chambers, 2004b). Standard Thus, the standard is Promoting Public Deliberation. Promoting Public Deliberation means providing opportunities for open debate and discussion over issues that affect citizens. This is a means-based standard – it’s not about increasing deliberation, but about preserving the elements of a system that allow for it. To link to the standard, the aff can’t just lead to an end that has deliberation, but must actively be consistent with deliberation. Thesis My thesis and sole contention is that deliberation requires dialogues. Striking is anti-deliberation because it requires action even with unjust conditions. Thomas Kochan, an MIT professor of industrial relations, agreed that it was a favorable time for workers – many corporations have substantially increased pay in response to the labor shortage. “It’s clear that workers are much more empowered,” he said. “They’re empowered because of the labor shortage.” Kochan added: “These strikes could easily trigger more strike activity if several are successful or perceived to be successful.” Robert Bruno, a labor relations professor at the University of Illinois, said workers have built up a lot of grievances and anger during the pandemic, after years of seeing scant improvement in pay and benefits. Bruno pointed to a big reason for the growing worker frustration: “You can definitely see that American capitalism has reigned supreme over workers, and as a result, the incentive for companies is to continue to do what’s been working for them. It’s likely that an arrogance sets in where companies think that’s going to last for ever, and maybe they don’t read the times properly.” Kevin Bradshaw, a striker at Kellogg’s factory in Memphis, said the cereal maker was being arrogant and unappreciative. During the pandemic, he said, Kellogg employees often worked 30 days in a row, often in 12-hour or 16-hour shifts. In light of this hard work, he derided Kellogg’s contract offer, which calls for a far lower scale for new hires. “Kellogg is offering a $13 cut in top pay for new workers,” Bradshaw said. “They want a permanent two-tier. New employees will no longer receive the same amount of money and benefits we do.” That, he said, is bad for the next generation of workers. Bradshaw, vice-president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union local, noted that it made painful concessions to Kellogg in 2015. “We gave so many concessions, and now they’re saying they need more,” he said. “This is a real smack in the face during the pandemic. Everyone knows that they’re greedy and not needy.” Kellogg said its compensation is among the industry’s best and its offer will help the company meet competitive challenges. Deere said it was determined to reach an agreement and continue to make its workers “the highest paid employees in the agriculture industry”. There are many strikes beyond Deere and Kellogg. More than 400 workers at the Heaven Hill bourbon distillery in Kentucky have been on strike for six weeks, while roughly 1,000 Warrior Met coalminers in Alabama have been on strike since April. Hundreds of nurses at Mercy hospital in Buffalo went on strike on 1 October, and 450 steelworkers at Special Metals in Huntington, West Virginia, also walked out that day. More than 30,000 nurses and other healthcare professionals at Kaiser Permanente on the west coast have voted to authorize a strike. Sixty thousand Hollywood production employees threatened to go on strike last Monday, unhappy that film and TV companies were not taking their concerns about overwork and exhaustion seriously. But seeing that the union was serious about staging its first-ever strike, Hollywood producers flinched, agreed to compromises, and the two sides reached a settlement. Noting that Kaiser Permanente, a non-profit, had amassed $45bn in reserves, Belinda Redding, a Kaiser nurse in Woodland Hills, California, said, “We’ve been going all out during the pandemic. We’ve been working extra shifts. Our lives have been turned upside down. The signs were up all over saying, ‘Heroes Work Here’. And the pandemic isn’t even over for us, and then for them to offer us a 1 raise, it’s almost a slap in the face.” Redding is also fuming that management has proposed hiring new nurses at 26 less pay than current ones earn – which she said would ensure a shortage of nurses. “It’s hard to imagine a nurse giving her all when she’s paid far less than other nurses,” Redding said. Kaiser said that its employees earn 26 more than average market wages and that its services would become unaffordable unless it restrains labor costs. On a smaller scale but in an industry in increasing demand, striking workers at one of the world’s largest bourbon producers were scheduled to vote on a new contract on Saturday, a day after announcing a tentative agreement with Heaven Hill, the producer of Evan Williams bourbon. About 420 members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23D went on strike about six weeks ago, forming picket lines at the company’s operations in Bardstown, Kentucky, with the dispute revolving around healthcare and scheduling. Meanwhile, many non-union workers – frequently dismayed with low pay, volatile schedules and poor treatment – have quit their jobs or refused to return to their old ones after being laid off during the pandemic. In August, 4.2 million workers quit their jobs, part of what has been called the Great Resignation. Some economists have suggested this is a quiet general strike with workers demanding better pay and conditions. “People are using exit from their jobs as a source of power,” Kochan said. As for unionized workers, some labor experts see parallels between today’s burst of strikes and the much larger wave of strikes after the first and second world wars. As with the pandemic, those catastrophic wars caused many Americans to reassess their lives and jobs and ask: after what we’ve been through, don’t we deserve better pay and conditions? Professor Bruno said that in light of today’s increased worker militancy, unionized employers would have to rethink their approach to bargaining “and take the rank and file pretty seriously”. They can no longer expect workers to roll over or to strong-arm them into swallowing concessions, often by threatening to move operations overseas. Bruno questioned whether the surge in strikes will be long-lasting. He predicts that the improvements in pay and job quality will be long-lasting, adding that that was more likely than unions substantially increasing their membership. He said that if workers see others winning better wages and conditions through strikes, that will raise unions’ visibility and lead to more workers voting to join unions. Despite the recent turbulence, Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at City University of New York, foresees a return to the status quo. “I think things will go back to where they were once things settle down,” she said. “The labor shortage is not necessarily going to last.” She sees the number of strikes declining once the labor shortage ends. In her view, union membership isn’t likely to increase markedly because “they’re not doing that much organizing. “There’s a little” – like the unionization efforts at Starbucks in Buffalo and at Amazon – “but it’s not as if there’s some big push.” A big question, Milkman said, was how can today’s labor momentum be sustained? She said it would help if Congress passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier to unionize workers. That law would spur unions to do more organizing and increase their chances of winning union drives. “That would be a real shot in the arm,” Milkman said. When South Africa obtained democracy in 1994, there was a dream of a better country with a new vision for industrial relations.5 However, the number of violent strikes that have bedevilled this country in recent years seems to have shattered-down the aspirations of a better South Africa. South Africa recorded 114 strikes in 2013 and 88 strikes in 2014, which cost the country about R6.1 billion according to the Department of Labour.6 The impact of these strikes has been hugely felt by the mining sector, particularly the platinum industry. The biggest strike took place in the platinum sector where about 70 000 mineworkers’ downed tools for better wages. Three major platinum producers (Impala, Anglo American and Lonmin Platinum Mines) were affected. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 25 June 2014. Business Day reported that “the five-month-long strike in the platinum sector pushed the economy to the brink of recession”. 7 This strike was closely followed by a four-week strike in the metal and engineering sector. All these strikes (and those not mentioned here) were characterised with violence accompanied by damage to property, intimidation, assault and sometimes the killing of people. Statistics from the metal and engineering sector showed that about 246 cases of intimidation were reported, 50 violent incidents occurred, and 85 cases of vandalism were recorded.8 Large-scale unemployment, soaring poverty levels and the dramatic income inequality that characterise the South African labour market provide a broad explanation for strike violence.9 While participating in a strike, workers’ stress levels leave them feeling frustrated at their seeming powerlessness, which in turn provokes further violent behaviour.10 These strikes are not only violent but take long to resolve. Generally, a lengthy strike has a negative effect on employment, reduces business confidence and increases the risk of economic stagflation. In addition, such strikes have a major setback on the growth of the economy and investment opportunities. It is common knowledge that consumer spending is directly linked to economic growth. At the same time, if the economy is not showing signs of growth, employment opportunities are shed, and poverty becomes the end result. The economy of South Africa is in need of rapid growth to enable it to deal with the high levels of unemployment and resultant poverty. One of the measures that may boost the country’s economic growth is by attracting potential investors to invest in the country. However, this might be difficult as investors would want to invest in a country where there is a likelihood of getting returns for their investments. The wish of getting returns for investment may not materialise if the labour environment is not fertile for such investments as a result of, for example, unstable labour relations. Therefore, investors may be reluctant to invest where there is an unstable or fragile labour relations environment. 3 THE COMMISSION OF VIOLENCE DURING A STRIKE AND CONSEQUENCES The Constitution guarantees every worker the right to join a trade union, participate in the activities and programmes of a trade union, and to strike. 11 The Constitution grants these rights to a “worker” as an individual.12 However, the right to strike and any other conduct in contemplation or furtherance of a strike such as a picket13 can only be exercised by workers acting collectively.14 The right to strike and participation in the activities of a trade union were given more effect through the enactment of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 199515 (LRA). The main purpose of the LRA is to “advance economic development, social justice, labour peace and the democratisation of the workplace”. 16 The advancement of social justice means that the exercise of the right to strike must advance the interests of workers and at the same time workers must refrain from any conduct that can affect those who are not on strike as well members of society. Even though the right to strike and the right to participate in the activities of a trade union that often flow from a strike17 are guaranteed in the Constitution and specifically regulated by the LRA, it sometimes happens that the right to strike is exercised for purposes not intended by the Constitution and the LRA, generally. 18 For example, it was not the intention of the Constitutional Assembly and the legislature that violence should be used during strikes or pickets. As the Constitution provides, pickets are meant to be peaceful. 19 Contrary to section 17 of the Constitution, the conduct of workers participating in a strike or picket has changed in recent years with workers trying to emphasise their grievances by causing disharmony and chaos in public. A media report by the South African Institute of Race Relations pointed out that between the years 1999 and 2012 there were 181 strike-related deaths, 313 injuries and 3,058 people were arrested for public violence associated with strikes.20 The question is whether employers succumb easily to workers’ demands if a strike is accompanied by violence? In response to this question, one worker remarked as follows: “There is no sweet strike, there is no Christian strike … A strike is a strike. You want to get back what belongs to you ... you won’t win a strike with a Bible. You do not wear high heels and carry an umbrella and say ‘1992 was under apartheid, 2007 is under ANC’. You won’t win a strike like that.” 21 The use of violence during industrial action affects not only the strikers or picketers, the employer and his or her business but it also affects innocent members of the public, non-striking employees, the environment and the economy at large. In addition, striking workers visit non-striking workers’ homes, often at night, threaten them and in some cases, assault or even murder workers who are acting as replacement labour. 22 This points to the fact that for many workers and their families’ living conditions remain unsafe and vulnerable to damage due to violence. In Security Services Employers Organisation v SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU),23 it was reported that about 20 people were thrown out of moving trains in the Gauteng province; most of them were security guards who were not on strike and who were believed to be targeted by their striking colleagues. Two of them died, while others were admitted to hospitals with serious injuries.24 In SA Chemical Catering and Allied Workers Union v Check One (Pty) Ltd,25 striking employees were carrying various weapons ranging from sticks, pipes, planks and bottles. One of the strikers Mr Nqoko was alleged to have threatened to cut the throats of those employees who had been brought from other branches of the employer’s business to help in the branch where employees were on strike. Such conduct was held not to be in line with good conduct of striking.26 These examples from case law show that South Africa is facing a problem that is affecting not only the industrial relations’ sector but also the economy at large. For example, in 2012, during a strike by workers employed by Lonmin in Marikana, the then-new union Association of Mine and Construction Workers Union (AMCU) wanted to exert its presence after it appeared that many workers were not happy with the way the majority union, National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), handled negotiations with the employer (Lonmin Mine). AMCU went on an unprotected strike which was violent and resulted in the loss of lives, damage to property and negative economic consequences including a weakened currency, reduced global investment, declining productivity, and increase unemployment in the affected sectors.27 Further, the unreasonably long time it takes for strikes to get resolved in the Republic has a negative effect on the business of the employer, the economy and employment. 3 1 Effects of violent and long strikes on the economy Generally, South Africa’s economy is on a downward scale. First, it fails to create employment opportunities for its people. The recent statistics on unemployment levels indicate that unemployment has increased from 26.5 to 27.2. 28 The most prominent strike which nearly brought the platinum industries to its knees was the strike convened by AMCU in 2014. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 24 June 2014. It affected the three big platinum producers in the Republic, which are the Anglo American Platinum, Lonmin Plc and Impala Platinum. It was the longest strike since the dawn of democracy in 1994. As a result of this strike, the platinum industries lost billions of rands.29 According to the report by Economic Research Southern Africa, the platinum group metals industry is South Africa’s second-largest export earner behind gold and contributes just over 2 of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).30 The overall metal ores in the mining industry which include platinum sells about 70 of its output to the export market while sales to local manufacturers of basic metals, fabricated metal products and various other metal equipment and machinery make up to 20. 31 The research indicates that the overall impact of the strike in 2014 was driven by a reduction in productive capital in the mining sector, accompanied by a decrease in labour available to the economy. This resulted in a sharp increase in the price of the output by 5.8 with a GDP declined by 0.72 and 0.78.32 But the result of such protests matter deeply as we consider police reform today. Historically, blue flu strikes have helped expand police power, ultimately limiting the ability of city governments to reform, constrain or conduct oversight over the police. They allow the police to leverage public fear of crime to extract concessions from municipalities. This became clear in Detroit more than 50 years ago. In June 1967, tensions arose between Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), which represented the city’s 3,300 patrol officers. The two were at odds primarily over police demands for a pay increase. Cavanagh showed no signs of caving to the DPOA’s demands and had, in fact, proposed to cut the police department’s budget. On June 15, the DPOA escalated the dispute with a walkout: 323 officers called in sick. The number grew over the next several days as the blue flu spread, reaching a height of 800 absences on June 17. In tandem with the walkout, the DPOA launched a fearmongering media campaign to win over the public. They took out ads in local newspapers warning Detroit residents, “How does it feel to be held up? Stick around and find out!” This campaign took place at a time of rising urban crime rates and uprisings, and only a month before the 1967 Detroit riot, making it especially potent. The DPOA understood this climate and used it to its advantage. With locals already afraid of crime and displeased at Cavanagh’s failure to rein it in, they would be more likely to demand the return of the police than to demand retribution against officers for an illegal strike. The DPOA’s strategy paid off. The walkout left Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin feeling “practically helpless.” “I couldn’t force them to work,” he later told The Washington Post. Rather than risk public ire by allowing the blue flu to continue, Cavanagh relented. Ultimately, the DPOA got the raises it sought, making Detroit officers the highest paid in the nation. This was far from the end of the fight between Cavanagh and the DPOA. In the ensuing months and years, they continued to tussle over wages, pensions, the budget, the integration of squad cars and the hiring of black officers. The threat of another blue flu loomed over all these disputes, helping the union to win many of them. And Detroit was not an outlier. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the blue flu was a ubiquitous and highly effective tactic in Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Newark, New York and many other cities. In most cases, as author Kristian Williams writes, “When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government’s long term interest in diminishing the rank and file’s power.” But each time a city relented to this pressure, they ceded more and more power to police unions, which would turn to the strategy repeatedly to defend officers’ interests — particularly when it came to efforts to address systemic racism in police policies and practices. In 1970, black residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood raised an outcry over the “hostile sadistic treatment” they experienced at the hands of white police officers. They lobbied Mayor Peter F. Flaherty to assign more black officers to their neighborhood. The mayor agreed, transferring several white officers out of the North Side and replacing them with black officers. While residents cheered this decision, white officers and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented them, were furious. They slammed the transfer as “discrimination” against whites. About 425 of the Pittsburgh Police Department’s 1,600 police officers called out sick in protest. Notably, black police officers broke with their white colleagues and refused to join the walkout. They praised the transfer as a “long overdue action” and viewed the walkout as a betrayal of officers’ oath to protect the public. Nonetheless, the tactic paid off. After several days, Flaherty caved to the “open revolt” of white officers, agreeing to halt the transfers and instead submit the dispute to binding arbitration between the city and the police union. Black officers, though, continued to speak out against their union’s support of racist practices, and many of them later resigned from the union in protest. Similar scenarios played out in Detroit, Chicago and other cities in the 1960s and ’70s, as white officers continually staged walkouts to preserve the segregated status quo in their departments. These blue flu strikes amounted to an authoritarian power grab by police officers bent on avoiding oversight, rejecting reforms and shoring up their own authority. In the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit walkout, a police commissioner’s aide strongly criticized the police union’s strong-arm tactics, saying “it smacks of a police state.” The clash left one newspaper editor wondering, “Who’s the Boss of the Detroit Police?” But in the “law and order” climate of the late 1960s, such criticism did not resonate enough to stir a groundswell of public opinion against the blue flu. And police unions dismissed critics by arguing that officers had “no alternative” but to engage in walkouts to get city officials to make concessions. Crucially, the very effectiveness of the blue flu may be premised on a myth. While police unions use public fear of crime skyrocketing without police on duty, in many cases, the absence of police did not lead to a rise in crime. In New York City in 1971, for example, 20,000 officers called out sick for five days over a pay dispute without any apparent increase in crime. The most striking aspect of the walkout, as one observer noted, “might be just how unimportant it seemed.” Today, municipalities are under immense pressure from activists who have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of black men and women. Some have already responded by enacting new policies and cutting police budgets. As it continues, more blue flus are likely to follow as officers seek to wrest back control of the public debate on policing and reassert their independence. | 2/21/22 |
ND - Deliberation NCTournament: Apple Valley | Round: 3 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Jason Meyer Simply put, Society is made up of conflicting conceptions of the good, and what justice demands is a set of principles acceptable to all. which can be used to resolve disagreements. Crucially, A liberal constitutional order must be based on ‘authority superior to’ that of’ particular conceptions, of the good, otherwise there is a risk that might makes right. An order where might makes right is problematic from a liberal perspective because Such an order easily violates the foundational ideal of equality. underpinning liberal constitutionalism. People have an interest in resolving such deep disagreements; but it matters to them how these disagreements are resolved. it is important that they feel the political order they have to obey is one that is acceptable and morally justifiable. to them. An important aspect of contemporary political philosophy is to define such a political order. The significance of this point needs to be emphasized. For most members of a society, their lives will go better if not interrupted by social strife and conflict, so the interest and motivation to avoid social conflict is strong. Furthermore, if conflicts and disagreements over deeply held convictions and strong interests can be resolved in ways that are morally justifiable to all members of society this serves as a potentially fruitful political order. In different forms, this issue has preoccupied political philosophers at least since the seventeenth century, and some of the most influential solutions have been cast in terms of a social contract (Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau). Stie Further, pluralism requires that all people have access to deliberation, since this creates publically justifiable procedures and helps people accept even outcomes they dislike. The modern idea of democracy basically amounts to the notion of the self-governing human being and a just society where free and equal individuals give themselves laws which in the next step can be seen as legitimate constraints on their actions. How can this ideal scenario honouring the principle of individual autonomy be translated to real life circumstances? Under conditions of pluralism, where there is no prospect of reaching a consensus on how everyone should live, their life, the way to determine whether decisions are legitimate cannot merely be about their substance. The chance that everyone will find a policy proposal equally good is unrealistic. Consequently, given that the substance of a proposal cannot function as the sole motivation to support a decision, the deliberative argument is that the legitimacy of decisions must first and foremost rest on the decisionmaking procedure itself. The assumption is that If an issue has been properly treated in a fair process, the likelihood that those who were opposed to the outcome will nevertheless respect it, as a legitimate constraint on their behaviour despite the fact that their position was rejected in the final decision-taking moment. The deliberative approach assumes that if there is a prospect for such a fair process preceding decision-making, majority vote can be democratically legitimised. Moreover, when the requirement of a prior process is respected, majority votes “…therefore represent only temporary stops in the continuous discussion about what should be done. Such a procedural interpretation of the majority principle makes it consistent with the concept of freedom when not applied to irreversible decisions. In this way discourse theory allows the individual to submit to laws that are not correct.” (Eriksen, 2006: 13; cf. also Chambers, 2004a: 397). Without such prior processes, on the other hand, the actual act of voting becomes nothing more than an arithmetic number at a given point in time (Eriksen, 2007b: 92-3). Consequently, if fair procedures are established they can provide the reason and motivate for minority positions to support majority decisions and can thus compensate for the unrealistic prospect that everyone will come to agreement on the substance of a decision. How can we reach this goal? We must first of all identify the normative/democratic standard that must be respected. In discourse theory this amounts to the discourse principle: “Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses.” (Habermas, 1998: 107). The discourse principle establishes that legitimate decisions are those that can be consented to after withstanding scrutiny and critique. by those who are going to be bound them. In representative democracies it is, however, not the case that all citizens and all affected parties are involved in actual decision-making. Hence the formulation “… could agree to…” is inserted in order to indicate that the principle can be used as a hypothetical litmus test for assessing the legitimacy of actual decisions (ibid, my emphasis; see also Eriksen 2007b: 93). It should immediately be added that the hypothetical test cannot replace actual public discourse (ibid). A viable democracy cannot do without public debate where policy proposals are tested and discussed in front of and involving the public. at large. What is more, the discourse principle implies that legitimate decisions are achieved linguistically if certain conditions for discourse are met. When translated to the institutional and procedural level, the discourse principle contains “…four ideal claims on institutions and processes: freedom, rationality, equality and publicity.” (Eriksen, 2007b: 95, 96) 4 . The bottom line is that democratically legitimate decisions have been validated through a particular type of process which entails that they have been defended, tested and criticised argumentatively in a publicly accessible debate and that minority positions have been included, listened to and taken into account during the course of a collective and inclusive process (Chambers, 2004b). Standard Thus, the standard is Promoting Public Deliberation. Promoting Public Deliberation means providing opportunities for open debate and discussion over issues that affect citizens. This is a means-based standard – it’s not about increasing deliberation, but about preserving the elements of a system that allow for it. To link to the standard, the aff can’t just lead to an end that has deliberation, but must actively be consistent with deliberation. Thesis My thesis and sole contention is that deliberation requires dialogues. Striking is anti-deliberation because it requires action even with unjust conditions. Thomas Kochan, an MIT professor of industrial relations, agreed that it was a favorable time for workers – many corporations have substantially increased pay in response to the labor shortage. “It’s clear that workers are much more empowered,” he said. “They’re empowered because of the labor shortage.” Kochan added: “These strikes could easily trigger more strike activity if several are successful or perceived to be successful.” Robert Bruno, a labor relations professor at the University of Illinois, said workers have built up a lot of grievances and anger during the pandemic, after years of seeing scant improvement in pay and benefits. Bruno pointed to a big reason for the growing worker frustration: “You can definitely see that American capitalism has reigned supreme over workers, and as a result, the incentive for companies is to continue to do what’s been working for them. It’s likely that an arrogance sets in where companies think that’s going to last for ever, and maybe they don’t read the times properly.” Kevin Bradshaw, a striker at Kellogg’s factory in Memphis, said the cereal maker was being arrogant and unappreciative. During the pandemic, he said, Kellogg employees often worked 30 days in a row, often in 12-hour or 16-hour shifts. In light of this hard work, he derided Kellogg’s contract offer, which calls for a far lower scale for new hires. “Kellogg is offering a $13 cut in top pay for new workers,” Bradshaw said. “They want a permanent two-tier. New employees will no longer receive the same amount of money and benefits we do.” That, he said, is bad for the next generation of workers. Bradshaw, vice-president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union local, noted that it made painful concessions to Kellogg in 2015. “We gave so many concessions, and now they’re saying they need more,” he said. “This is a real smack in the face during the pandemic. Everyone knows that they’re greedy and not needy.” Kellogg said its compensation is among the industry’s best and its offer will help the company meet competitive challenges. Deere said it was determined to reach an agreement and continue to make its workers “the highest paid employees in the agriculture industry”. There are many strikes beyond Deere and Kellogg. More than 400 workers at the Heaven Hill bourbon distillery in Kentucky have been on strike for six weeks, while roughly 1,000 Warrior Met coalminers in Alabama have been on strike since April. Hundreds of nurses at Mercy hospital in Buffalo went on strike on 1 October, and 450 steelworkers at Special Metals in Huntington, West Virginia, also walked out that day. More than 30,000 nurses and other healthcare professionals at Kaiser Permanente on the west coast have voted to authorize a strike. Sixty thousand Hollywood production employees threatened to go on strike last Monday, unhappy that film and TV companies were not taking their concerns about overwork and exhaustion seriously. But seeing that the union was serious about staging its first-ever strike, Hollywood producers flinched, agreed to compromises, and the two sides reached a settlement. Noting that Kaiser Permanente, a non-profit, had amassed $45bn in reserves, Belinda Redding, a Kaiser nurse in Woodland Hills, California, said, “We’ve been going all out during the pandemic. We’ve been working extra shifts. Our lives have been turned upside down. The signs were up all over saying, ‘Heroes Work Here’. And the pandemic isn’t even over for us, and then for them to offer us a 1 raise, it’s almost a slap in the face.” Redding is also fuming that management has proposed hiring new nurses at 26 less pay than current ones earn – which she said would ensure a shortage of nurses. “It’s hard to imagine a nurse giving her all when she’s paid far less than other nurses,” Redding said. Kaiser said that its employees earn 26 more than average market wages and that its services would become unaffordable unless it restrains labor costs. On a smaller scale but in an industry in increasing demand, striking workers at one of the world’s largest bourbon producers were scheduled to vote on a new contract on Saturday, a day after announcing a tentative agreement with Heaven Hill, the producer of Evan Williams bourbon. About 420 members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23D went on strike about six weeks ago, forming picket lines at the company’s operations in Bardstown, Kentucky, with the dispute revolving around healthcare and scheduling. Meanwhile, many non-union workers – frequently dismayed with low pay, volatile schedules and poor treatment – have quit their jobs or refused to return to their old ones after being laid off during the pandemic. In August, 4.2 million workers quit their jobs, part of what has been called the Great Resignation. Some economists have suggested this is a quiet general strike with workers demanding better pay and conditions. “People are using exit from their jobs as a source of power,” Kochan said. As for unionized workers, some labor experts see parallels between today’s burst of strikes and the much larger wave of strikes after the first and second world wars. As with the pandemic, those catastrophic wars caused many Americans to reassess their lives and jobs and ask: after what we’ve been through, don’t we deserve better pay and conditions? Professor Bruno said that in light of today’s increased worker militancy, unionized employers would have to rethink their approach to bargaining “and take the rank and file pretty seriously”. They can no longer expect workers to roll over or to strong-arm them into swallowing concessions, often by threatening to move operations overseas. Bruno questioned whether the surge in strikes will be long-lasting. He predicts that the improvements in pay and job quality will be long-lasting, adding that that was more likely than unions substantially increasing their membership. He said that if workers see others winning better wages and conditions through strikes, that will raise unions’ visibility and lead to more workers voting to join unions. Despite the recent turbulence, Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at City University of New York, foresees a return to the status quo. “I think things will go back to where they were once things settle down,” she said. “The labor shortage is not necessarily going to last.” She sees the number of strikes declining once the labor shortage ends. In her view, union membership isn’t likely to increase markedly because “they’re not doing that much organizing. “There’s a little” – like the unionization efforts at Starbucks in Buffalo and at Amazon – “but it’s not as if there’s some big push.” A big question, Milkman said, was how can today’s labor momentum be sustained? She said it would help if Congress passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier to unionize workers. That law would spur unions to do more organizing and increase their chances of winning union drives. “That would be a real shot in the arm,” Milkman said. When South Africa obtained democracy in 1994, there was a dream of a better country with a new vision for industrial relations.5 However, the number of violent strikes that have bedevilled this country in recent years seems to have shattered-down the aspirations of a better South Africa. South Africa recorded 114 strikes in 2013 and 88 strikes in 2014, which cost the country about R6.1 billion according to the Department of Labour.6 The impact of these strikes has been hugely felt by the mining sector, particularly the platinum industry. The biggest strike took place in the platinum sector where about 70 000 mineworkers’ downed tools for better wages. Three major platinum producers (Impala, Anglo American and Lonmin Platinum Mines) were affected. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 25 June 2014. Business Day reported that “the five-month-long strike in the platinum sector pushed the economy to the brink of recession”. 7 This strike was closely followed by a four-week strike in the metal and engineering sector. All these strikes (and those not mentioned here) were characterised with violence accompanied by damage to property, intimidation, assault and sometimes the killing of people. Statistics from the metal and engineering sector showed that about 246 cases of intimidation were reported, 50 violent incidents occurred, and 85 cases of vandalism were recorded.8 Large-scale unemployment, soaring poverty levels and the dramatic income inequality that characterise the South African labour market provide a broad explanation for strike violence.9 While participating in a strike, workers’ stress levels leave them feeling frustrated at their seeming powerlessness, which in turn provokes further violent behaviour.10 These strikes are not only violent but take long to resolve. Generally, a lengthy strike has a negative effect on employment, reduces business confidence and increases the risk of economic stagflation. In addition, such strikes have a major setback on the growth of the economy and investment opportunities. It is common knowledge that consumer spending is directly linked to economic growth. At the same time, if the economy is not showing signs of growth, employment opportunities are shed, and poverty becomes the end result. The economy of South Africa is in need of rapid growth to enable it to deal with the high levels of unemployment and resultant poverty. One of the measures that may boost the country’s economic growth is by attracting potential investors to invest in the country. However, this might be difficult as investors would want to invest in a country where there is a likelihood of getting returns for their investments. The wish of getting returns for investment may not materialise if the labour environment is not fertile for such investments as a result of, for example, unstable labour relations. Therefore, investors may be reluctant to invest where there is an unstable or fragile labour relations environment. 3 THE COMMISSION OF VIOLENCE DURING A STRIKE AND CONSEQUENCES The Constitution guarantees every worker the right to join a trade union, participate in the activities and programmes of a trade union, and to strike. 11 The Constitution grants these rights to a “worker” as an individual.12 However, the right to strike and any other conduct in contemplation or furtherance of a strike such as a picket13 can only be exercised by workers acting collectively.14 The right to strike and participation in the activities of a trade union were given more effect through the enactment of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 199515 (LRA). The main purpose of the LRA is to “advance economic development, social justice, labour peace and the democratisation of the workplace”. 16 The advancement of social justice means that the exercise of the right to strike must advance the interests of workers and at the same time workers must refrain from any conduct that can affect those who are not on strike as well members of society. Even though the right to strike and the right to participate in the activities of a trade union that often flow from a strike17 are guaranteed in the Constitution and specifically regulated by the LRA, it sometimes happens that the right to strike is exercised for purposes not intended by the Constitution and the LRA, generally. 18 For example, it was not the intention of the Constitutional Assembly and the legislature that violence should be used during strikes or pickets. As the Constitution provides, pickets are meant to be peaceful. 19 Contrary to section 17 of the Constitution, the conduct of workers participating in a strike or picket has changed in recent years with workers trying to emphasise their grievances by causing disharmony and chaos in public. A media report by the South African Institute of Race Relations pointed out that between the years 1999 and 2012 there were 181 strike-related deaths, 313 injuries and 3,058 people were arrested for public violence associated with strikes.20 The question is whether employers succumb easily to workers’ demands if a strike is accompanied by violence? In response to this question, one worker remarked as follows: “There is no sweet strike, there is no Christian strike … A strike is a strike. You want to get back what belongs to you ... you won’t win a strike with a Bible. You do not wear high heels and carry an umbrella and say ‘1992 was under apartheid, 2007 is under ANC’. You won’t win a strike like that.” 21 The use of violence during industrial action affects not only the strikers or picketers, the employer and his or her business but it also affects innocent members of the public, non-striking employees, the environment and the economy at large. In addition, striking workers visit non-striking workers’ homes, often at night, threaten them and in some cases, assault or even murder workers who are acting as replacement labour. 22 This points to the fact that for many workers and their families’ living conditions remain unsafe and vulnerable to damage due to violence. In Security Services Employers Organisation v SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU),23 it was reported that about 20 people were thrown out of moving trains in the Gauteng province; most of them were security guards who were not on strike and who were believed to be targeted by their striking colleagues. Two of them died, while others were admitted to hospitals with serious injuries.24 In SA Chemical Catering and Allied Workers Union v Check One (Pty) Ltd,25 striking employees were carrying various weapons ranging from sticks, pipes, planks and bottles. One of the strikers Mr Nqoko was alleged to have threatened to cut the throats of those employees who had been brought from other branches of the employer’s business to help in the branch where employees were on strike. Such conduct was held not to be in line with good conduct of striking.26 These examples from case law show that South Africa is facing a problem that is affecting not only the industrial relations’ sector but also the economy at large. For example, in 2012, during a strike by workers employed by Lonmin in Marikana, the then-new union Association of Mine and Construction Workers Union (AMCU) wanted to exert its presence after it appeared that many workers were not happy with the way the majority union, National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), handled negotiations with the employer (Lonmin Mine). AMCU went on an unprotected strike which was violent and resulted in the loss of lives, damage to property and negative economic consequences including a weakened currency, reduced global investment, declining productivity, and increase unemployment in the affected sectors.27 Further, the unreasonably long time it takes for strikes to get resolved in the Republic has a negative effect on the business of the employer, the economy and employment. 3 1 Effects of violent and long strikes on the economy Generally, South Africa’s economy is on a downward scale. First, it fails to create employment opportunities for its people. The recent statistics on unemployment levels indicate that unemployment has increased from 26.5 to 27.2. 28 The most prominent strike which nearly brought the platinum industries to its knees was the strike convened by AMCU in 2014. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 24 June 2014. It affected the three big platinum producers in the Republic, which are the Anglo American Platinum, Lonmin Plc and Impala Platinum. It was the longest strike since the dawn of democracy in 1994. As a result of this strike, the platinum industries lost billions of rands.29 According to the report by Economic Research Southern Africa, the platinum group metals industry is South Africa’s second-largest export earner behind gold and contributes just over 2 of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).30 The overall metal ores in the mining industry which include platinum sells about 70 of its output to the export market while sales to local manufacturers of basic metals, fabricated metal products and various other metal equipment and machinery make up to 20. 31 The research indicates that the overall impact of the strike in 2014 was driven by a reduction in productive capital in the mining sector, accompanied by a decrease in labour available to the economy. This resulted in a sharp increase in the price of the output by 5.8 with a GDP declined by 0.72 and 0.78.32 But the result of such protests matter deeply as we consider police reform today. Historically, blue flu strikes have helped expand police power, ultimately limiting the ability of city governments to reform, constrain or conduct oversight over the police. They allow the police to leverage public fear of crime to extract concessions from municipalities. This became clear in Detroit more than 50 years ago. In June 1967, tensions arose between Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), which represented the city’s 3,300 patrol officers. The two were at odds primarily over police demands for a pay increase. Cavanagh showed no signs of caving to the DPOA’s demands and had, in fact, proposed to cut the police department’s budget. On June 15, the DPOA escalated the dispute with a walkout: 323 officers called in sick. The number grew over the next several days as the blue flu spread, reaching a height of 800 absences on June 17. In tandem with the walkout, the DPOA launched a fearmongering media campaign to win over the public. They took out ads in local newspapers warning Detroit residents, “How does it feel to be held up? Stick around and find out!” This campaign took place at a time of rising urban crime rates and uprisings, and only a month before the 1967 Detroit riot, making it especially potent. The DPOA understood this climate and used it to its advantage. With locals already afraid of crime and displeased at Cavanagh’s failure to rein it in, they would be more likely to demand the return of the police than to demand retribution against officers for an illegal strike. The DPOA’s strategy paid off. The walkout left Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin feeling “practically helpless.” “I couldn’t force them to work,” he later told The Washington Post. Rather than risk public ire by allowing the blue flu to continue, Cavanagh relented. Ultimately, the DPOA got the raises it sought, making Detroit officers the highest paid in the nation. This was far from the end of the fight between Cavanagh and the DPOA. In the ensuing months and years, they continued to tussle over wages, pensions, the budget, the integration of squad cars and the hiring of black officers. The threat of another blue flu loomed over all these disputes, helping the union to win many of them. And Detroit was not an outlier. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the blue flu was a ubiquitous and highly effective tactic in Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Newark, New York and many other cities. In most cases, as author Kristian Williams writes, “When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government’s long term interest in diminishing the rank and file’s power.” But each time a city relented to this pressure, they ceded more and more power to police unions, which would turn to the strategy repeatedly to defend officers’ interests — particularly when it came to efforts to address systemic racism in police policies and practices. In 1970, black residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood raised an outcry over the “hostile sadistic treatment” they experienced at the hands of white police officers. They lobbied Mayor Peter F. Flaherty to assign more black officers to their neighborhood. The mayor agreed, transferring several white officers out of the North Side and replacing them with black officers. While residents cheered this decision, white officers and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented them, were furious. They slammed the transfer as “discrimination” against whites. About 425 of the Pittsburgh Police Department’s 1,600 police officers called out sick in protest. Notably, black police officers broke with their white colleagues and refused to join the walkout. They praised the transfer as a “long overdue action” and viewed the walkout as a betrayal of officers’ oath to protect the public. Nonetheless, the tactic paid off. After several days, Flaherty caved to the “open revolt” of white officers, agreeing to halt the transfers and instead submit the dispute to binding arbitration between the city and the police union. Black officers, though, continued to speak out against their union’s support of racist practices, and many of them later resigned from the union in protest. Similar scenarios played out in Detroit, Chicago and other cities in the 1960s and ’70s, as white officers continually staged walkouts to preserve the segregated status quo in their departments. These blue flu strikes amounted to an authoritarian power grab by police officers bent on avoiding oversight, rejecting reforms and shoring up their own authority. In the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit walkout, a police commissioner’s aide strongly criticized the police union’s strong-arm tactics, saying “it smacks of a police state.” The clash left one newspaper editor wondering, “Who’s the Boss of the Detroit Police?” But in the “law and order” climate of the late 1960s, such criticism did not resonate enough to stir a groundswell of public opinion against the blue flu. And police unions dismissed critics by arguing that officers had “no alternative” but to engage in walkouts to get city officials to make concessions. Crucially, the very effectiveness of the blue flu may be premised on a myth. While police unions use public fear of crime skyrocketing without police on duty, in many cases, the absence of police did not lead to a rise in crime. In New York City in 1971, for example, 20,000 officers called out sick for five days over a pay dispute without any apparent increase in crime. The most striking aspect of the walkout, as one observer noted, “might be just how unimportant it seemed.” Today, municipalities are under immense pressure from activists who have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of black men and women. Some have already responded by enacting new policies and cutting police budgets. As it continues, more blue flus are likely to follow as officers seek to wrest back control of the public debate on policing and reassert their independence. | 2/21/22 |
ND - Just Government DATournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington AT | Judge: Zach Thornhill The search for a new politics and a new critical language that crosses the critical theory/postmodern divide must reinvigorate the relationship between democracy, ethics, and political agency by expanding both the meaning of the pedagogical as a political practice while at the same time making the political more pedagogical. In the first instance, it is crucial to recognize that Pedagogy has less to do with the language of technique and methodology than it does with issues of politics and power. Pedagogy is amoral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations and must be understood as a cultural politics that offers both a particular version and vision of civic life, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. As Roger Simon (1987) observes: As an introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life, education always presupposes a vision of the future. In this respect a curriculum and its supporting pedagogy are a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and out communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension. It is in this respect that Any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a form of cultural politics, as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all value is informed by practices which organize knowledge and meaning. ( ROB and Giroux 2 The Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Position that Fosters Solutions to Social Oppression. Fostering solutions to social oppression means identifying and trying to redress inequality, rather than theorizing without realizing. Critical pedagogy locates discursive practices in a broader set of interrelations, but it also analyzes and gives meaning to such relations by defining them within particular contexts constructed through the operations of power as articulated through the interaction among texts, teachers, and students. Questions of articulation and context need to be fore grounded as both a matter of ethics and politics. Ethically, critical pedagogy requires an ongoing indictment “of those forms of truth-seeking which imagined themselves to be eternally and placelessly valid” (Gilroy, 2000, p.69). Simply put, Educators need to must cast a critical eye on those forms of knowledge and social relations that define themselves through a conceptual purity and political innocence that cloud not only how they come into being but also ignore that their alleged neutrality on which they stand is already grounded in ethico-political choices. Thomas Keenan (1997) rightly argues that Ethics on the pedagogical front demands an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a ‘politics of possibility’ through a continual critical engagement. with texts, images, events, and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into public pedagogies (p. 2). One consequence of linking pedagogy to the specificity of place is that it foregrounds the need for educators to rethink the cultural and political baggage they bring to each educational encounter; it also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically and politically accountable for the stories they produce, the claims they make upon public memory, and the images of the future they deem legitimate. Pedagogy is never innocent and if it is to be understood and problematized as a form of academic labor, mold it. Running a standard like “util” or “maximizing expected well-being” links them directly into the K. Assuming that people have identical interests, or that there’s some value-neutral “well-being” we all share, is exactly the problem. A. Links
Curry 1 First, the very notion of “just governments” appeals to a White-centered ethic that itself oppresses black people. Traditionally we have taken ethics to be, as Henry Sidgwick’s claims, "any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings 'ought'—or what is right for them—or to seek to realize by voluntary action.”vii This rational procedure is however at odds with the empirical reality the ethical deliberation must concern itself with. To argue, as is often done, that the government, its citizens, or white people should act justly, assumes that the possibility of how they could act defines their moral disposition. If a white person could possibly not be racist, it does not mean that the possibility of not being racist, can be taken to mean that they are not racist. In ethical deliberations dealing with the problem of racism, it is common practice to attribute to historically racist institutions, and individuals universal moral qualities that have yet to be demonstrated. This abstraction from reality is what frames our ethical norms and allows us to maintain, despite history or evidence, that racist entities will act justly given the choice. Under such complexities, The only ethical deliberation concerning racism must be anti-ethical, or a judgment refusing to write morality onto immoral entities. In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the dominant illusion is that discourse itself, an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as “similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such Discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual., who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined, not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch. Thus, they can’t redefine the notion of “just governments” even if they try to reconceptualize the living wage: Black people must still appeal to white people for such claims to be recognized. Ought implies a projected (futural) act. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive,. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, they can ideally imagine an ‘if condition,’ whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: ‘if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors.’ Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and 4 hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action., hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics. | 2/21/22 |
ND - NLRA CPTournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Kevin Cheng | 2/21/22 |
ND - T ATournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington AT | Judge: Zach Thornhill The three articles — a, an, the — are a kind of adjective. The is called the definite article because it usually precedes a specific or previously mentioned noun; a and an are called indefinite articles because they are used to refer to something in a less specific manner (an unspecified count noun). These words are also listed among the noun markers or determiners because they are almost invariably followed by a noun (or something else acting as a noun). caution CAUTION! Even after you learn all the principles behind the use of these articles, you will find an abundance of situations where choosing the correct article or choosing whether to use one or not will prove chancy. Icy highways are dangerous. The icy highways are dangerous. And both are correct. The is used with specific nouns. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something that is one of a kind: The moon circles the earth. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something in the abstract: The United States has encouraged the use of the private automobile as opposed to the use of public transit. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something named earlier in the text. (See below..) If you would like help with the distinction between count and non-count nouns, please refer to Count and Non-Count Nouns. We use a before singular count-nouns that begin with consonants (a cow, a barn, a sheep); we use an before singular count-nouns that begin with vowels or vowel-like sounds (an apple, an urban blight, an open door). Words that begin withan h sound often require an a (as in a horse, a history book, a hotel), but if an h-word begins with an actual vowel sound, use an an (as in an hour, an honor). We would say a useful device and a union matter because the u of those words actually sounds like yoo (as opposed, say, to the u of an ugly incident). The same is true of a European and a Euro (because of that consonantal "Yoo" sound). We would say a once-in-a-lifetime experience or a one-time hero because the words once and one begin with a w sound (as if they were spelled wuntz and won). Merriam-Webster's Dictionary says that we can use an before an h- word that begins with an unstressed syllable. Thus, we might say an historical moment, but we would say a History book. Many writers would call that an affectation and prefer that we say a historical, but apparently, this choice is a matter of personal taste. For help on using articles with abbreviations and acronyms (a or an FBI agent?), see the section on Abbreviations. First and subsequent reference: When we first refer to something in written text, we often use an indefinite article to modify it. A newspaper has an obligation to seek out and tell the truth. In a subsequent reference to this newspaper, however, we will use the definite article: There are situations, however, when the newspaper must determine whether the public's safety is jeopardized by knowing the truth. Another example: "I'd like a glass of orange juice, please," John said. "I put the glass of juice on the counter already," Sheila replied. Exception: When a modifier appears between the article and the noun, the subsequent article will continue to be indefinite: "I'd like a big glass of orange juice, please," John said. "I put a big glass of juice on the counter already," Sheila replied. Generic reference: We can refer to something in a generic way by using any of the three articles. We can do the same thing by omitting the article altogether. A beagle makes a great hunting dog and family companion. An airedale is sometimes a rather skittish animal. The golden retriever is a marvelous pet for children. Irish setters are not the highly intelligent animals they used to be. The difference between the generic indefinite pronoun and the normal indefinite pronoun is that the latter refers to any of that class ("I want to buy a beagle, and any old beagle will do.") whereas the former (see beagle sentence) refers to all members of that class. C. Net Benefits
2. Second, GROUND: TVA Solves: Implication DROP THE DEBATER: No RVIs NO RVIs: Competing Interps USE COMPETING INTERPS: | 2/21/22 |
ND - T Just GovernmentTournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington AT | Judge: Zach Thornhill Nyabola UK policies don’t secure liberties Despite these various layers of legal protection, human rights nevertheless remain a contested concept in the British political tradition. They are capable of being interpreted and understood in different ways. Deep disagreement often exists as to what exactly constitutes a breach of a fundamental right. Furthermore, different views exist as to when and how the courts should intervene to protect individual rights. Politicians regularly subject the HRA to criticism, and bemoan the influence exerted by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over UK law. In 2010 and again in 2015 the Conservative election manifesto proposed replacing the HRA with a ‘British Bill of Rights’, although in practice Tory governments since 2015 have not been able to implement this idea. Successive UK governments have also introduced legislation that has diluted protections for civil liberties and fundamental rights in the spheres of national security/counter-terrorism, immigration and socio-economic entitlements: it is likely that this pattern will continue. Brexit is posing further challenges, by in particular removing the safety blanket for certain non-discrimination, migrant and labour rights formerly provided by EU law. The place of both the HRA and European Convention of Human Rights within the UK’s legal system thus remains open to debate, as does the status of human rights values more generally: no consensus yet exists as to how human rights should best be protected within the framework of the British constitution. And while the scope of legal rights protection in the UK is relatively strong, it is limited. Socio-economic rights are particularly poorly covered, and international human rights law has very limited impact on UK law or policy.
2. Limits – | 2/21/22 |
ND - T-Just Gov V2Tournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Kevin Cheng Hill The aff must defend a just government as the agent of action – that means a state that treats people equally. Why not have differing levels of respect and noninterference depending on differing abilities? Human beings demonstrating mind-numbing levels of rationality or scoring in the 99th percentile on rationality tests could be accorded higher levels of respect and noninterference than others. But the respect is not parceled out in chunks upon receipt of rationality vouchers, or distributed as a reward for dexterity in forming Venn diagrams or executing syllogistic reasoning. It results from humanity as a group crossing a threshhold; because human beings can make choices, importantly moral choices, and formulate plans, they are due the opportunity to make the choices and design the plans. No matter how well or poorly thought-out the plans or how selfish or altruistic the choices, the fundamental human ability to choose and plan grounds the moral rights equally for all human beings. The ability is a shared, species-wide ability (I do not mean to claim that this has some biological foundation) and the concomitant moral rights are also equally shared. Being treated equally is one of the indicators of justice. Rawls muses about justice "always expressing a kind of equality" (1971, p. 58) and John Stuart Mill claims that equality is "included among the precepts of justice" (1987, p. 474). Being treated justly, in the sense of being treated fairly and equitably, would seem to flow naturally out of the minimal moral rights mentioned above. (I am referring here only to fairness and equity in respect of basic rights, not with respect to distribution of resources, as presented by Rawls.) Relating to others respectfully requires evenhandedness: It would be disrespectful to take advantage of someone, cheat her or coerce her into an action. A State, recast here as a collective of human beings, should operate with the injunction that it must respect all human beings based on recognition of their moral rights. In its pursuit of that goal, it would be forced to act justly, for to treat another with respect, in Kantian terms as an "end" rather than as a "means" only, is simply to act with the equality and impartiality that characterize justice. It might be charged that if the government has to treat everyone justly and with this minimal level of respect, then it would have to treat citizen and non-citizen in the same way. Citizen and non-citizen would be afforded security and protection under the law. So diffuse would government regulation become that it would be difficult to tell where one country ended and another began since all persons would be showered with benign superintendence. This charge stretches "minimal respect and just dealings" to an unsupportable extent. The possession of minimal rights does not entail voting rights or other benefits accruing from citizenship. It simply ushers forth forbearance from harm, justice in transactions. A question has been raised as to whether grounding the justification of the state in the upholding the rights of its citizens may not be too strong; that is, it would preclude states from taking actions that are necessary for the maintenance and progress of the state, such as sending citizens to war, or exercising "eminent domain" over property. To this objection I would argue that having a right does not guarantee that a person always gets her way. This would depend on whether there were another competing and equally valid right held by another or whether there were some compelling need by other right-holders which could temporarily override the claiming of the original right. Having rights would entail that a person's concerns, goals, interests would be taken into account and weighed carefully against the competing claims of other rights-holders. It would ensure that citizens not be sent to fight wars for frivolous or unjust causes, that they not be tricked or forced into testing mustard gas, Agent Orange, or suffering unnecessarily the long-term effects of syphilis, and that they not have their house demolished to build a freeway without good reason and compensation. If, as Locke and others argue, the state's only raison d'être is the betterment of its citizens' lives, then I see no reason why the argument that the state must recognize the rights of its citizens and base its actions on upholding those rights would be deemed dangerous. A State is obligated, then, because of the moral rights attached to humanity, to relate to all human beings with which it comes into contact with at least minimal respect and forbearance, or more succinctly, with justice. Crump Their aff makes the U.S. the actor – that’s a FUNDAMENTALLY UNJUST AND ANTI-BLACK STATE. Systemic injustice and racism have deep historical roots in this country. Broadly speaking, these terms are defined as deeply ingrained racist thinking, practices, and actions embedded in the core foundations of American society that have persisted over centuries and continue today. The struggle against racial injustice issues in America boiled over once again in 2020 following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black men and women. Attorney Ben Crump – a fierce advocate for equality, justice, and civil rights – represents the Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery families, and many more families of those killed, harmed, or marginalized due to systemic injustice and racism. This article highlights racial injustice in America and reveals the many ways that it affects Black people’s health, education, livelihoods, and lives. Readers will come away with a heightened awareness of how the web of systemic inequities in America works against Black Americans. Racial Injustice Definition To understand how racial injustice affects the lives of people of color in the United States, we must first understand the meaning of racial injustice. Anytime a person is denied their constitutional rights based upon the color of their skin, racial injustice has occurred. Whether it is apparent or not, this form of discrimination is woven into the very fabric of our society, from our economy to our healthcare system to our education system. For a free legal consultation, call 800-730-1331 Civil Rights Lawyer Ben Crump Explains Racial Injustice Attorney Ben Crump is a civil rights crusader who has dedicated his career to combating racial injustice. Here, he explains how racial inequality affects many issues in the US. Institutional and Systemic Racism in America Discrimination Is Pervasive in American Life Environmental Injustice in America Black LGBTQ Discrimination in America Racism and Discrimination in Sports Injustice in the Workplace Racism and Black Mental Health Black Protest Income Inequality Political Inequality and Voting While Black Racial Inequalities in Education Healthcare Inequalities: COVID Criminal Justice Inequalities #LivingWhileBlack #BreathingWhileBlack Institutional and Systemic Racism in America If you think of contemporary forms of racism such as police brutality, racial profiling and racial disparities as the leaves or fruit of white supremacy, then the roots of this metaphoric tree would be colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and other past structural inequalities that have subjugated Black people and people of color. The terms institutional racism and systemic racism are now often used interchangeably to describe broad systems of racial oppression that occur in social and other institutions. While some contemporary forms of discrimination or racism may look or seem new to some, anti-Black racism is fundamentally unchanged. During the Black Power movement of the 1960s, activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton coined the term institutional racism in their book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967) to distinguish between individual and institutional racism. As Michael Eric Dyson reminds us in Tears We Cannot Stop, “Institutional racism requires neither conscious effort nor individual intent.” In short, racism is deeply ingrained in all aspects of our society, producing social, economic, and political inequalities that are inextricably connected to the past. In 1939 Billie Holiday sang about “strange fruit” hanging from trees, a reference to lynched Black bodies in the South. Systemic racism tells us that the seeds of this “strange fruit” were sown long ago and that this fruit continues to rot in our present. The tragic killing of George Floyd is a modern day example of that. Discrimination Is Pervasive in American Life Some people assume that racism happens primarily on an individual level or that only people enact racism. C. Net Benefit Roberts and Rizzo THEY REINFORCE RACISM – their unquestioning acceptance of the U.S. as just PASSIVELY PERPETUATES THE PROBLEM. American Passivism Perhaps the most insidious component of American racism is passive racism; an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems exist. The American psychologist Beverly Tatum (1997) characterized racism as a moving walkway at an airport. Individuals who are actively racist, she argued, acknowledge racial hierarchy and the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reinforce it, and choose to walk—or run—along with it. Individuals who are passively racist, on the other hand, simply stand still and are moved along by the walkway. These individuals are not actively reinforcing racism, but they are nonetheless moving in the same direction as those who are. As an illustration, imagine two people playing a game of Monopoly. One player is allowed to collect $200 whenever they pass go, build property wherever and whenever they want, and has a lower probability of drawing “Go to Jail” cards. The other player gets none of these luxuries. To rectify the system of advantage, one could restart the game, redefine the rules and redistribute the wealth, or stop playing the game altogether. To maintain the system, however, one could simply do nothing, or have both players follow the same rules moving forward (i.e., both players can now collect $200 whenever they pass go, build property wherever and whenever they want, and have an equal probability of drawing “Go to Jail” cards), while leaving the unequal wealth distribution intact. Continuing to play under this guise of “equality” would not entail actively contributing to the system; it would entail passively maintaining it (i.e., one player is still advantaged).3 This scenario is in many ways analogous to American racism, in which for centuries, Americans of color were forced into free or cheap labor and denied the right to own businesses and properties, vote in political elections, and receive an education or fair employment. These realities, many of which persist today, continue to exert their effect. For example, in 1983, the median net worth of White Americans was $86,500 higher than that of Black Americans, and by 2013, this difference rose to $133,000 (Stepler, 2016). In 2015, the household median net worth for White Bostonians was $247,000, whereas for Black Bostonians, it was $8 (Johnson, 2017). To maintain such racism, individuals and institutions need only do nothing about it. There are many pathways to passive racism. One is through ignorance (Nelson, Adams, and Salter, 2013). Consider again the Monopoly scenario. If a child observes that one player has amassed greater wealth than the other, but is ignorant as to how this inequality came to be, they will likely have no reason to intervene and may even develop preferences for the wealthier player (Roberts, Ho, et al., 2020). Yet if the child learns that there exists a structural reason for the inequality (i.e., racism), rather than a dispositional reason (i.e., the poor player’s incompetence), they may perceive the game as unfair and in need of intervention (Rizzo and Killen, 2018). Indeed, U.S. adults who are ignorant about historical racism often deny contemporary racism (Nelson et al., 2013). A second (and related) pathway to passive racism is through denial. Both White Americans and Americans of color are more likely than ever to deny that racism is a major problem facing U.S. society, which reduces the motivation to support antiracist policies, such as affirmative action or the redistribution of wealth, and could promote the belief that racial inequality is justified by differences in effort (e.g., Black people should simply work harder; Kraus, Onyeador, Daumeyer, Rucker, and Richeson, 2019; Salter et al., 2018). A third pathway to passive racism is through the observation of inaction in others. Darley and Latané (1968) found that in emergencies, people are less likely to help others when surrounded by bystanders (i.e., individuals who observe but do not act). This phenomenon, recognized as the “bystander effect,” is motivated by at least three psychological factors: (a) a feeling of less responsibility in the presence of others (i.e., diffusion of responsibility), (b) a fear that helping will elicit negative public judgment (i.e., evaluation apprehension), and (c) the belief that the situation must not really be an emergency if nobody is helping (i.e., pluralistic ignorance, see Hortensius and de Gelder, 2018). These factors may apply to racism as well. Taking refuge in the comfort of other societal bystanders, fearing the ramifications of speaking out against racist institutions, and the denial of the full weight of the consequences of living in a racist society all passively reinforce racism. Those who observe others do nothing about racism may reason that there is no problem in need of solving, and may subsequently become passively, if not actively, racist. Note that White Americans who are passively racist are further advantaged by racism, whereas Americans of color who are passively racist continue to be disadvantaged by it. Treating the U.S. as just means we can’t question its actions – we assume they’re fair from the outset. Voter CRITICAL EDUCATION – No RVIs NO RVIs: | 2/21/22 |
ND - Union DATournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Kevin Cheng The GM strike, beginning in September of 2019, is set to be the largest strike of the past 18 years. In fact, 2018 as a whole saw the largest number of strikes in decades and support for labor unions has polled at a 20 year high with candidates like Bernie Sanders highlighting their importance in his economic and political strategies. Many left-leaning individuals often express admiration for the union golden era of the 1940s and 50s, when there were sometimes as many as 400 strikes of over 1000 people per year and union membership was at a historic high. With all the positive rhetoric surrounding unions, it may be difficult for someone to understand why anyone, aside from cartoonish caricatures of capitalist pig-men in coat and tails, would ever dislike unions. However, the unintended consequences of the GM strike highlight the ways in which the main tool of unions, the strike, is deeply flawed from a political economy perspective. With a decline in union membership and manufacturing in the US and the interconnectivity of global supply chains, the benefits of a strike fall to fewer and fewer hands while the direct consequences of the strike can still cause great harm to the local economy. Many in America live paycheck-to-paycheck, and strikes can have a strong impact on the financial well-being of the strikers who have to tighten their belt or go into debt. In communities that rely on money from manufacturing workers to spend, this can cause an intense ripple effect that can be felt for miles. If Bob the tire quality control specialist doesn’t have any money, then he doesn’t buy coffee from his local diner, which in turn affects the income of the cooks in the diner who may then forgo purchases at other stores. This is essentially the so-called “virtuous cycle” of economic growth working in reverse, which can cause an intense contraction, which some fear could cause a recession locally as well as statewide. Thusly, even ordinary working people in an area attached to a factory town have a vested interest in ensuring union strikes are ended quickly and do not happen often. This generally results in anti-union legislation or in legislation to cement union desires into public policy without causing the type of damage typically associated with strikes. Locals near an autoplant are not the only people that have direct financial stake in ensuring strikes don’t happen. Suppliers up and down the chain are also deeply affected and even more intimately attached to these strikes. Within GM itself, roughly 10,000 non-union workers have been placed on furlough as a result of the strike mentioned at the beginning of the piece. This is because without unionized labor in certain fields, the whole cycle of production shuts down, and everyone involved is unable to continue working. With chains of supply so directly interlinked, a stop at any point, union or non-union, could cause a work-stop for all other points in the chain. Workers in Canada and Mexico have also been placed on unpaid furlough, causing them to lose income without any possibility of gain and with no incentive on behalf of their American counterparts to represent their competing interests. Auto parts suppliers to GM, such as American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings, have already reported having to lay off workers due to projected losses from the strike. Car dealerships, which are up the supply chain from the plant, have reported hardships in servicing GM cars due to shortages of materials as well. This point brings me to the last victim of strikes: the wider public. America is fundamentally a consumption heavy economy. Our strength relies on our ability to purchase and consume. Almost 70 percent of our GDP comes from consumption. Any reduction in consumption affects the economy as a whole in a big way, and strikes cause a reduction in production and consumption of the product in question and other products inadvertently. If prices or parts get too scarce, that causes prices to go up and consumers to be shut out of the market. Even worse than that, many states such as Tennessee rely almost exclusively on sales tax for government revenue (California still nets about 20 billion a year in sales taxes). A strike not only affects consumers but also affects the most vulnerable members of our society who rely on government sponsored welfare. In conclusion, part of the reason for the decline in political support for unions is due to incredible destructive and disruptive power of strikes. While national labor standards laws can be achieved through the ballot box, the picket line drives a wedge between union interests and the rest of society. Unions should stick to grassroots and political organization because, while strikes can bring them short term gains, they hurts those around them and expose the single-minded interest that unions have for their membership and the ability to disregard and harm their community at large. Perez et al TURNS CASE: union legitimacy is key to worker retention, good conditions, and more. Reform must be responsive to the lessons we have learned from the challenges working people have faced during the pandemic. One of the main lessons is the need for and power of workers’ collective voice in the workplace. Where workers have been able to act collectively and through their union, they have been able to secure enhanced safety measures, additional premium pay, and paid sick time. Unionized workers have had a voice in how their employers navigate the pandemic, including negotiating for terms of furloughs or work-share arrangements to save jobs. Research shows the advantages workers in unions have over nonunionized workers. Workers with strong unions have been able to set industry standards for wages and benefits that help all workers, both union and nonunion (Rhinehart and McNicholas 2020). Never in recent history has this dynamic been more clear. Never has it been more important that all workers have a voice in the workplace and access to a union. Workers’ lives and the health and safety of working families depends on their ability to have a say in how they do their jobs. They add: The Trump administration’s failure to provide essential workers with basic protections during the coronavirus pandemic has underscored the importance of unions (McNicholas and Poydock 2020b). With a union, workers have negotiated additional pay,10 health and safety measures,11 paid sick leave,12 and job preservation.13 Furthermore, unionized workers have felt more secure speaking out about hazards (Jamieson 2020). Without unions, many workers are forced to work without personal protective equipment or access to paid leave or premium pay. And when nonunion workers have advocated for health and safety protections or wage increases, they have often been retaliated against or even fired for doing so (Paul 2020; Davenport, Bhattarai, and McGregor 2020; Kruzel 2020; Eidelson 2020; Miller 2020). The lack of these basic protections has led to thousands of essential workers becoming infected with the coronavirus, and many are dying as a result (Bhattarai 2020; Kaplan and Kent 2020; Jewett, Bailey, and Renwick 2020). | 2/21/22 |
NovDec - Racist StrikesTournament: Princeton | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Scarsdale BS | Judge: Jayanne Forrest, Albert Kang, Claudia Ribera The racialized picket line can be thought of as a metaphorical dividing line of conflict influencing the way a strike unfolds. Part of this process occurs when labor (class) soli- darity becomes weakened and/or replaced with racial forms of solidarity (Martinot, 2003). Racialized strikes arise within the context of capitalism, where exploitation is structured on the racial and gender divisions among workers which encourages differen- tial treatment and a wage tier system (Jackman, 1994). Social inequality structurally determines varying degrees of exploitation particular groups of workers face based on a group’s race, gender, and/or citizenship status (Bonacich et al., forthcoming). These divi- sions allow capitalists to seek out labor forces that are most susceptible to higher degrees of exploitive labor practices while simultaneously lowering the wages of more privileged workers (Bonacich, 1972, 1975, 1976). Glenn (2002) develops a similar argument, tracing the ways in which capitalists utilize divisions of workers along lines of race and gender inequality. Owners of cap- ital sought to maximize their profits by paying the lowest possible wages while enact- ing maximum control over the production processes. Moreover, they took advantage of existing inequalities by using marginalized groups (people of color, immigrants, women, lesser skilled) that could be hired more cheaply. Free labor, as a Western institution, was not developed for people of color but instead for white people and white societies (Blauner, 2001). Citizenship rights, or the lack thereof, prove to be a pivotal signifier of defining class relations in the USA along racialized and gendered lines. Citizenship as it applies to labor thus plays a major role in linking racist eco- nomic doctrines that distinguish between forms of free labor and unfree labor (Almaguer, 1994; Glenn, 2002). Since citizenship rights were historically given to free (white male) labor groups, white men were allowed a privileged position in the US labor market. These privileges have allowed white men to join unions and increase their economic and social power in society (Royster, 2003). This also led to the for- mation of the ‘worker citizen’ ideal, which is constitutive of the dual attributes of whiteness and masculinity forming the ideal-type American worker (Glenn, 2002). Therefore, exclusion was a primary feature of the making of the white working class (Fletcher, 2002; Kimmel, 1996). For white strikers participating in a multiracial labor struggle such as the grocery strike, this racial divide creates a host of practices that white strikers enact in order to maintain the racialized picket line. Although white workers ultimately stand to lose from a racially divided working class, many white workers continue to reinforce racial divisions. One of the reasons for this is that the ideological component of white supremacy becomes a site of influence beyond the sheer class location of the white working class (Martinot, 2003; Wellman, 1993). Roediger’s (1991) analysis of the formation of the white working class offers a start- ing point for explaining how racial divisions operate in today’s labor conflicts. From the perspective of white workers during a strike, scabs are racialized and ‘othered’ as impediments to class victory. In this sense, white workers view workers of color as a threat and thus express their resentment toward workers of color as an act to protect white workers’ interests (Bonacich, 1972). The split labor market theory has been used to explain the underlying causes behind racialized labor and the divide among work- ing classes along racial lines (Bonacich, 1972, 1975, 1976; Boswell, 1986; Brown and Boswell, 1995; Brueggemann and Boswell, 1998). According to Bonacich (1972: 549), ‘The central hypothesis of the split labor theory is that ethnic antagonism first germinates in a labor market split along ethnic lines.’ In a split labor market, the domi- nant racial/ethnic (i.e. white) group develops a racial caste system that confines lower-cost labor of color to lower-paying and lower-status jobs, thereby undermining multiracial class solidarity. This impacts the degree of solidarity across racial lines and often reinforces divisions among workers. In other words, split labor markets can aid in maintaining/producing racism and racial privilege along with other forms of inequality, such as patriarchy and sexism. Wilson 4 First, white people otherize workers of color in the strike to create racial hierarchies. Roediger’s (1991) analysis of the formation of the white working class offers a start- ing point for explaining how racial divisions operate in today’s labor conflicts. From the perspective of white workers during a strike, scabs are racialized and ‘othered’ as impediments to class victory. In this sense, white workers view workers of color as a threat and thus express their resentment toward workers of color as an act to protect white workers’ interests (Bonacich, 1972). The split labor market theory has been used to explain the underlying causes behind racialized labor and the divide among work- ing classes along racial lines (Bonacich, 1972, 1975, 1976; Boswell, 1986; Brown and Boswell, 1995; Brueggemann and Boswell, 1998). According to Bonacich (1972: 549), ‘The central hypothesis of the split labor theory is that ethnic antagonism first germinates in a labor market split along ethnic lines.’ In a split labor market, the domi- nant racial/ethnic (i.e. white) group develops a racial caste system that confines lower-cost labor of color to lower-paying and lower-status jobs, thereby undermining multiracial class solidarity. This impacts the degree of solidarity across racial lines and often reinforces divisions among workers. In other words, split labor markets can aid in maintaining/producing racism and racial privilege along with other forms of inequality, such as patriarchy and sexism. | 12/4/21 |
NovDec - Weheliye KTournament: Princeton | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Scarsdale BS | Judge: Jayanne Forrest, Albert Kang, Claudia Ribera Paradoxically, the particular biological material in question remains the property, at least nominally, of all humanity and is not proper to Moore the individual person: “Lymphokines, unlike a name or a face, have the same molecular structure in every human being and the same, important functions in every human being's immune system. Moreover, the particular genetic material which is responsible for the natural production of lymphokines, and which defendants use to manufacture lymphokines in the laboratory, is also the same in every person; it is no more unique to Moore than the number of vertebrae in the spine or the chemical formula of hemoglobin.”20 So, while the court grants personhood to human subjects in an individualized fashion that is based on comparatively distinguishing between different humans, when biological material clashes with the interests of capital, the court appeals to the indivisible biological sameness of the Homo sapiens species. Since the court's ruling does not place this slice of human flesh in the commons for all humans to share, it tacitly grants corporations the capability of legally possessing this material with the express aim of generating monetary profit. Considering that corporations enjoy the benefits of limited personhood and the ability to live forever under U.S. law, corporate entities are entrusted with securing the immortal life of biological matter, while human persons are denied ownership of their supposed essence.21 My interest here lies not in claiming inalienable ownership rights for cells derived from human bodies such as Lacks's and Moore's but to draw attention to how thoroughly the very core of pure biological matter is framed by neoliberal market logics and by liberal ideas of personhood as property. We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need no tbe redeployed within hegemonic framework but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. Instead of inciting explicit hatred or violence directed against people of color partici- pating in multiracial union organizing, today’s white workers tend to use racial code- words and other more subtle forms of racialized rhetoric to undermine scabs (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Omi and Winant, 1994; Wellman, 1993). The use of less explicit racial rhetoric used by white strikers to describe scabs of color allows them to disguise their racial intentions, while still getting their underlying point across. This newer form of racialized rhetoric acts to maintain white hegemony within union ranks and also acts to maintain white racial solidarity while still appearing to be egalitarian to outsiders. The use of racial code words by white strikers is also demonstrative of what Omi and Winant (1994) identify as the rearticulation of racial ideology. Understanding these changing dynamics in white working class racial consciousness is important in order to assess the modern labor movement’s shortcomings so that we can build strategies to combat such impediments to the success of organized labor. As these data demonstrate, the racialized class statuses of workers of color are points by which white workers enhance their moral position in the strike. Since white workers can no longer explicitly exclude workers of color from unions to the same extent as prac- ticed in previous times, white workers have developed newer strategies to marginalize people of color, which rely on larger structural forms of inequality that white workers capitalize on in their descriptions of scabs and customers. Suffering, especially when caused by political violence, has long functioned as the hallmark of both humane sentience and of inhuman brutality. Frequently, suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality. In western human rights discourse, for instance, the physical and psychic residues of political violence enable victims to be recognized as belonging to the “brotherhood of Man.” Too often, this tendency not only leaves intact hegemonic ideas of humanity as indistinguishable from western Man but demands comparing different forms of subjugation in order to adjudicate who warrants recognition and belonging. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2 Wendy Brown maintains, “politicized identity” operates “only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future...that triumphs over this pain.”3 Brown suggests replacing the identitarian declaration “I am,” which merely confirms and solidifies what already exists, with the desiring proclamation “I want,” which offers a Nietzschean politics of overcoming pain instead of clinging to suffering as an immutable feature of identity politics. While I recognize Brown's effort to formulate a form of minority politics not beholden to the aura of wounded attachments and fixated almost fetishistically on the state as the site of change, we do well to recall that many of the political agendas based on identity (the suffragette movement, the movement for the equality of same-sex marriages, or the various movements for the full civil rights of racialized minority subjects, for instance) are less concerned with claiming their suffering per se (I am) than they are with using wounding as a stepping stone in the quest (I want) for rights equal to those of full citizens. Liberal governing bodies, whether in the form of nation-states or supranational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court make particular forms of wounding the precondition for entry into the hallowed halls of full personhood, only acknowledging certain types of physical violence. For instance, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed a resolution in 2008 that includes rape and other forms of sexual violence in the category of war crimes, there are many forms of sexual violence that do not fall into this purview, and thus bar victims from claiming legal injury and/or personhood.4 Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one's personhood. Then and only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status. Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject's desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state's dogged insistence on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status in the vein of property. Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities. Life in a liberated zone entails: •Sustainably making and/or finding food •Sustainably making and developing people as the carriers and creators of productivity, culture, wisdom and technology •Making meaning: evolving life beyond birth, survival, and death •Collectively and determinedly defending what we have made The Limitations of The So-called Democracy of an Oppressive System There was a time when you could buy a car of any color, as long as it was black. There wasn’t much choice. These days, we are encouraged to vote in elections where we can support candidates from either of the two-capitalist war-mongering parties. Independent candidates who actually support social transformation are described as wasted votes or not allowed to get very far in the political vetting process. It brings to mind an option that might have been offered to the enslaved to vote on which plantation to be enslaved on, or to choose their overseer based on their position on what would be the maximum number of lashes in a beating, or the best way to punish low production or talking back. I’d like to think that I am a descendent from the slave who would have stood on the back row of such a slave voting campaign gathering, constantly looking up into the sky. When asked what they were looking for and why, they would whisper, “Y’all go ahead and vote on one of them or the other, but I’m looking for the north star in the dipping gourd. ‘Cause first chance I get, I’m outta here.” In the USA, we won’t vote ourselves to freedom in spite of the rhetoric of what claims to be the more progressive of the two oppressive exploitative parties. We will have to build freedom. And on leaving the plantation, we may want to burn down the big house. Not because burning it will feed us, but rather because it just seems like the right thing to do. The Devastating Nature of the Present It should be clear to us that we don't all share equitably in the benefits from modern world. We live in a world of the domination of capital. In it the owner class accumulates the surplus created by those who produce value. Those in the owning class then use their control over the socially created value to dominate virtually every aspect of social life for the singular purpose of being able to extract and accumulate even more value. This power that comes as a benefit of the ownership of means of life is used to threaten death by starvation to all who resist obeying the needs of capital expansion. There is no limit to the greed of the capitalist system. The unlimited expansion of capital is the singular logic of this world system. But infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet, and we see the effect of careless exploitation of natural resources and human activity on the planet’s ability to support human life with its needs for clean water and clean air in addition to controlling the potential for climate disasters that are caused by human activity. He adds: There are already existing communities that are very much like the liberated zones I describe here. There are intentional communities that combine collective living arrangements with productive opportunities, often including or even centered around food production. Some of them are arranged as egalitarian communities where everything is shared, and intense democratic processes draw all of the community members into collective decision making on all of the community’s affairs, including how the necessary tasks for the community are shared. There is a long history of such communities and they have likely had little impact on the larger societies outside of them, even though they possess many transformative elements. Some of these communities are insular in nature and mainly represent a way to get away from what is painful, irrational, or at the very least, undesirable in the mainstream communities. Many of these communities are also known for leading a rustic, some might even say primitive existence. That is partly a reflection of the distance between these communities and the consumerism that surrounds them. I would offer that for the type of liberated zones that I think will make more of a difference to be viable, they would have to be able to create an intense loyalty among those who live in them, and a strong base of support for those on the outside, who, for one reason or the other do not. It would never be sufficient to offer that these communities are capable, or even interested in replicating the lifestyles that have been created in the dominant society. There would need to be some conscious breaking away from societal norms. But I contend that it becomes easier as the existing structures prove themselves increasingly incapable of keeping their promises of a comfortable life for the many. But we still have to ask, “Is it enough stuff?” You know we are addicted to bigger and bigger piles of stuff, despite the ecological price that we pay and the fact that for whatever we accumulate there is someone somewhere trying to sell us more. There are still those who will not be satisfied unless they are able to buy the things that are being marketed to them. Many young people will not remember, but once a 19-inch TV was considered a big screen. Nowadays, folks with limited income will buy 52” and 80” screens on time terms, claiming that these are household needs. While I am no one to object to other people’s desires, I don’t think the liberated zones that I envision would be producing large screen TV units in the near term. There would likely be live theatre, and live concerts, and live music, art and poetry shows on the regular. This is what I mean when I talk about the need to make meaning. We are capable of leading good lives without the consumer debt peonage that many of us have become accustomed to as a means of fulfilling the dreams not of our families and communities, but rather the dreams of the marketers who derive their privilege from compensation they get from getting us to buy things that we don’t need, and quite honestly might not have even thought of, had the marketers not told us that we just had to have them. It is sad that we are called upon to measure ourselves, not by what we know, not by what we can do, not by what we are, but rather by what we buy at high prices because of celebrity endorsements. It is sad to hear “I just want to get paid.” As the highest aspiration of some young folks. And when someone points out to them the unfairness of a system that makes many more losers than winners and points out that we deserve a society that is fair and creates opportunities for all, it is so sad to hear, “I'll take my chance. I’d rather take a chance at being rich than to have certainty of a less glamorous existence.” We need to remember that we are addicted. But more and more people are coming to realize that the deck is stacked. You get to cut the cards but the jokers, the aces and kings have all been taken out of the deck. There is very little left to win. This isn’t really gambling, because we have no chance. Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding anti-pathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality.40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture's purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources...—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter's oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups. | 12/4/21 |
PLEASE READ - RRTournament: Yale | Round: Finals | Opponent: all | Judge: all Here are RR | 11/6/21 |
Please ReadTournament: all | Round: 1 | Opponent: all | Judge: all | 9/11/21 |
SeptOct - T-frameworkTournament: Grapevine | Round: 3 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor Johnson AP | Judge: Micah Thode LII “Intellectual property,” is defined as: Legal Information Institute. LII of Cornell Law school aims to develop systems that allow users from outside the legal profession to access and understand the laws that govern them more easily. “Intellectual property” Legal Information Institute, No date. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intellectual_property AC Intellectual property Overview In general terms, intellectual property is any product of the human intellect that the law protects from unauthorized use by others. The ownership of intellectual property inherently creates a limited monopoly in the protected property. Intellectual property is traditionally comprised of four categories: patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets. Common Law Common law did not recognize intellectual property rights. Justice Brandeis communicated this belief in his dissent to International News Service v. Associated Press:"The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, as free as the air to common use." The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business. Who we are There are a number of ways of looking at the World Trade Organization. It is an organization for trade opening. It is a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements. It is a place for them to settle trade disputes. It operates a system of trade rules. Essentially, the WTO is a place where member governments try to sort out the trade problems they face with each other. What we do The WTO is run by its member governments. All major decisions are made by the membership as a whole, either by ministers (who usually meet at least once every two years) or by their ambassadors or delegates (who meet regularly in Geneva). Vote neg for predictable limits—post-facto topic adjustment structurally favors the aff by manipulating the balance of prep which is anchored around the resolution as a stasis point. Not debating the topic allows someone to specialize in one area of the library for 4 years giving them a huge edge over people who switch research focus every 2 months, which means their arguments are presumptively false because they haven’t been subject to well-researched scrutiny. Two Impacts –
2. Testing – a clear stasis point of the rez allows for clash over a topic that is pre-decided, engagement with arguments and clash are the reason why we are in the activity, the idea of how we engage, how we engage in strategies, are all things that we learn through this activity. This fundamentally turns the affirmative because you prevent us from engaging in the affirmative where you can learn how your strategy works, where I can learn how your strategy works, how the judge learns which prevents real world skills - we don’t actually solve real world harms in this round so we should endorse the best strategy and model to do that. TVA solves – read an AFF about how patents decrease access to medications or treatment/stigmatize pwd. You should also evaluate their answers to T through a lens of switch side – their ability to read this affirmative on the negative solves all their offense so vote negative on preserving some form of competitive equity within debate. Use competing interps – topicality is question of models of debate which they should have to proactively justify, and we’ll win reasonability links to our offense. Drop the debater - dropping the arg is severance which moots 7 minutes of 1nc offense. No RVI’s – it’s your burden to be topical, don’t give them the ballot for not being unfair or uneducational. | 9/11/21 |
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